When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed. Digging in to a challenging work project that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a bracing act of choice; giving a difficult novel the time it demands becomes a source of relish. “You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward,” Brown explains. You give up “demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes.” You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience…
We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution – any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control. So we snap at our partners, rather than hearing them out, because waiting and listening would make us feel – correctly – as though we weren’t in control of the situation.
Three Principles of Patience
- Develop a taste for having problems – Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires—that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.
- Embrace radical incrementalism – If you’ve decided to work on a given project for fifty minutes, then once fifty minutes have elapsed, get up and walk away from it. Why? Because as Boice explained, the urge to push onward beyond that point “includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time” for work. Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.
- More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality – This begins with the willingness to stop and be where you are – to engage with that part of the journey, too, instead of always badgering reality to hurry up. To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person; to know what it’s like to be deeply rooted in a particular community and place, you have to stop moving around. Those are the kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments that just take the time they take.
