The Insidious timelessness of the pee-word

I shouldn't have waited this long. It's inexusable...

I'm only three minutes and twenty seconds late and you're complaining?

According to my watch, it's four minutes or more.

You should get a watch that comes with a second hand, and be a bit more patient.

I bet your mother told you to be patient when you were growing up. But hasn't her advice led you to calamities?

Let me see... Once I had been too patient and found myself standing in a puddle of slightly colored and faintly steaming water. First it was nice and warm, but quickly turned soggy and cold. It's a bad idea to delay going to the toilet anyway. Your logic is a fallacy of accident.

Did your father ever tell you that the last piece of a cake is the biggest?

If it is a proverb, I've never heard of it. Besides, it sounds so untrue. If the biggest is left, it is most likely because nobody really wanted the cake to start with.

You see, we all think patience is a virtue, but it has an insidious side. Many people could not quite see what was to take place when Adolf Hitler came into power. Those who exercised patience and stayed put, especially the Jewish, suffered the most.

Patience is inappropriate in certain situations. Is this your point?

Not only that, but it is also used as a trick to raise false hope.

Comrade, your language reeks of perniciousness today.

Well, that is what patience is mostly about.

There are many satirical works about penny-pinching---"The Miser/L'Avare" by Molière comes to my mind first---but not about patience.

"Waiting for Godot/En attendant Godot" by Samuel Beckett is open to various interpretations, but as far as I am concerned, it is not about patience paving the path to the desired state in life.

Are you sure that patience is so bad? If you are facing a child, aged six, who is frustrated that he cannot swim as far as he wishes to, isn't it good to tell him to be patient?

When he turns eighteen or so, he would be able to swim as far as he could in his life. But that is based on a relatively safe assumption that he would grow up normally.

If it were an eighty-six year old, it would indeed be inappropriate to suggest patience. In fact, there wouldn't be anything you can say to or do for him, but to share the sadness that the stretch that he covered today will be the best ever compared to what he would be able to do in the future.

Patience is not for all ages. It makes most sense when you know that external factors are evolving in your favor and that they are beyond your control.

Like physiological maturity in the case of six-year old swimmer.

Unfortunately, the world is replete with cases of other types.

Tell me what they are.

We have already discussed one type in which external factors are beyond your control and they become less favorable over time.

The old man and the sea...

Another type is that the normal set of external factors become unfavorable over time, but they could be overcome.

I suppose that is not by simple waiting.

It requires a set of abnormal external factors---called luck---and/or hard work during an extended period of time.

Luck is beyond our control by definition, so it may not be out of line to exercise patience and wait for the Goddess of Destiny to turn to you and smile.

Yes and no. Sometimes you can sniff where luck could be found and deliberately place yourself there. Some other times, you have to be able to recognize luck as such when it comes around.

The problem with patience stems from our equating it to picking our nose and waiting, then?

Or, to simple repetition of our routine. For example, strengthening of certain muscles would be most effective with a changing menu of workouts. Plus, it is usually beneficial to try something that is slightly beyond your capability. The same applies for anything mental, too.

When we train on a higher level, we can be confident about one level lower to ourselves and about two levels lower to others.

In short, when the normal set of external factors become unfavorable over time, they could be overcome with luck and/or effective activities.

Put differently, the identification of those 'effective activities' is the crux of the problem.

Bravo, comrade. Even the six-year old must keep on swimming regularly and try his best all the time to be able to cover a long stretch in the future. If he doesn't and gets up on his eighteenth birthday thinking that he can cross the Strait of Dover in the afternoon, he would be in for a major disappointment.

I have been taught to be patient, as you guessed correctly, but not what I should be doing in the meantime.

Waiting would be a good idea when we are stranded in the middle of nowhere and we know that the next available transportation will be arriving in three hours and eighteen minutes. However, it is not the best idea.

What about reading a book or listening to music for three hours and seventeen minutes, and reserving the last minute for packing up and getting ready for boarding a rickshaw, sleigh, motor bike, bus, jeep, canoe, 470, submarine, airplane, helicopter, balloon, zeppelin, or space shuttle?

No, still not the best strategy.

Should we hatch a plot against the cause which made us stranded?

Not exactly. We should seriously think what we could do in case the expected transportation does not appear in three hours and eighteen minutes.

We tend to think that patience is to wait, and hence, to let time pass by. But that interpretation may turn out not to be helpful even in the simplest case as transportation.

Yet, people who advise you to be patient usually do not tell you that you should continue to strive for obtaining a better grasp of the situation that you are in and be on the lookout for its actual and possible changes.

After all, if circumstances change, staying put is seldom wise.

A person who is unhappy because of unfulfilled goals and wishes is often counseled to be patient. But if it is not accompanied by what s/he should be doing in the meantime, it is equivalent to advising her/him to accept things as they are. One of its hideous effects is to raise hope in the person that s/he would attain her/his goal without doing anything in particular.

"Be patient, and you will get there."

Which is nonsense in most instances. You should not be repeating what you have been doing, because it has not led to achievement of your goal, and that is why you are unhappy. In most cases, you have to change your strategy, or at least you need to become more vigilant about monitoring the state of parameters that are important in attaining your goal.

But they never tell you such things...

I think talking about patience is a convenient way to make a whining person shut up.

I'm afraid many people resort to what you call a trick.

Patience is insidious because it makes us hopeful when there is no concrete reason to be.

We are happier, because we have become hopeful without realizing that it is unwarranted, and the person who told us about patience is also happier, because we stopped complaining...

Persistence is almost as bad, but marginally better for not urging passivity as much.

Comrade, I think that's simply your personal preference of words, just as you prefer 'perceptive' over 'sensitive.'

It could be even more damaging when we are patient without being told to be so.

More?

Any belief can be quite tenacious.

What is wrong with that?

I am disappointed that you haven't see through, comrade... Because patience is plain passiveness in most cases, we are exposed to great danger of becoming comfortable with the situation that we earlier wished to escape from.

Patience tells us to close our eyes half way to weather out the storm.

The key is to keep our eyes half open, but we can get too good at not seeing the brutal reality.

Ah, it's the ostrich in us...

If we manage to maintain dignity in a wretched environment, naturally our desire to flee from it is tamed. That is the hidden, but huge, cost of successfully living through the undesirable circumstances.

We become so good at handling them that they are elevated from the status of undesirable.

That happens without our knowing and remains so for some of us for the rest of our lives.

Doesn't it mean that they find contentment in life and come to terms with what they are given?

We could say that they have turned into true ostriches, and eventually forgot that they were something else earlier in their lives with their heads out of the hole in the ground.

Well, they're lucky that nobody has poked their butt.

Some do get that poking one day, forced to take their heads out of the hole, and experience the horrible realization that the time spent with patience was not time spent to achieve their goals.

It's not after a week or a month that happens. It can take years, right?

Half past twelve. How the time has gone by.

Half past twelve. How the years have gone by. Constantine Cavafy's "Since Nine O'Clock"...

People with belief in plain patience have nobody to turn to, but themselves to blame for their unhappiness.

It's because they don't examine their plight carefully, never give serious thoughts to what could be the best possible action for fulfilling their goals or utilizing their precious time... They fall asleep, in a way.

As I told you, some never wake up but others do. Patience is hideous---first, it gives us false hope, and then, it gradually makes us forget what we aimed for. If we happen to be jolted out of that lukewarm water slowly reaching the boiling point to kill us, we face the terrible fact that an enormous amount of time has passed, with little action on our part to obtain what we wanted in our lives. And during that time, the external factors have turned even less conducive for reaching our goals.

Comrade... you look awfully pale... I'd say like a ghost.

It can well happen to those who think they know very well that they can get used to almost anything and must guard themselves against that process, who think they know the finiteness of their existence...

... Let me treat you to a glass of Médoc.

Isn't it one of the tricks to avert our eyes from what is in front of us?

It's not la Baie des Anges that we are overlooking, but you shouldn't spoil my gesture which is meant to help ease your self-reproach, you know...

Signs of maturity (or lack thereof)

It's that time of the year, the school has started again.

New encounters, new subjects, new classrooms... always a mixture of excitement and anxiety.

I happened to read a piece of advice for teachers the other day. It said that if you are a teacher, you should never talk negatively about your predecessor.

Such as, "No? You guys didn't cover the nine essential nutrients for Martians last year? That can't be! ... All right, I will prepare an extra handout on that subject and distribute it next time. It's very, very important."

With eyebrow knitted and eyes squinted... The article said that from then on the students would start making claims that the previous instructor skipped the topic whatever it may be.

Including the ones that they had been taught.

I hereby confess that I committed a crime that is similar in nature in the past.

I am shocked!

It is again to my disadvantage to be endowed with good memory and a strong will to be impartial... Almost all of us are guilty of the same, but many conveniently are unconscious or forget about it.

So much for excuses. Let's hear what you have done.

When the school year started, we had a new teacher. She was a substitute until the regular hire came back from her maternity leave.

That's not unusual.

We knew neither instructor before. When the term was over for the fill-in and we got to know the regular instructor, we found out that we liked the substitute much better. We talked nostalgically how nice and good she was. One day, I showed my exam to my parents and said that I would have gotten a perfect grade had it been the former teacher.

It's a very flimsy excuse, comrade.

The scary thing is that I believed in it. All of my classmates were of the same opinion. So, when my parents told me that my explanation for the grade was not a good one, I told them that everyone in the class thought the same.

Yes, yes, that familiar "everyone," which can mean a handful of persons.

They replied that we would be saying the same had the regular been the substitute, and the substitute the regular.

It was not about their teaching methods or even personality, but about the role that they assumed.

I was very much surprised by their take on the event, of course.

Did you believe it?

I didn't dismiss it. I remembered it and wondered how that could be. Although I do not recall whether we claimed we had not been taught something we should have, I have a vague feeling that I participated in that kind of collective rewriting of history with my classmates. I think we knew that our claim might not have been true, but after some time, we simply believed in the revised "facts."

Hmmm... we as adults engage in acts of the same genre to more disastrous results.

People who deny all sorts of atrocities, such as genocides, fit that description.

They must have started their training early in their lives.

My recent discovery is that it happens on a smaller scale, too. Some people truly believe in what I think is grossly distorted versions of events. When I confront them, they are adamant that their version is true.

They must be thinking the same about you.

How come that they always come out unambiguously favorable in their stories?

Whereas you do not in your versions?

I know that it's not quite tight, but I claim that it is a proof that I am less biased than they are.

If your argument holds, some people may make themselves appear only partially guilty when they are wholly so, and claim that their take on the event is the true one.

The lack of impartiality in this world is mind boggling. What is even more flabbergasting is that the ones who genuinely believe in their distorted, self-serving history more than often win in the end. At least, they never lose thanks to their single-minded tenacity.

Blessed are the believers...

Back to my memories from school years, we once had a teacher trainee whom we liked very much because she was a lot closer in age. She had big sunglasses and boyfriend sweaters on. Her hair was adult and feminine. She radiated youthful confidence. In sum, she was awfully cool.

Everybody liked her, I bet.

Yes, until I was told to stop chitchatting and pay attention to her lecture.

Aha...

When some students got together and talked about how cool and effective in teaching she was, I snorted and said I wasn't sure. Then one in the circle said, "You changed your mind, because you were told to be quiet.''

There's no denying that it's a very good point.

I was shocked, because I realized then that it was true. The teacher trainee was no different before and after her telling me to be quiet, but I allowed myself to be biased against her in aspects that had little to do with her telling me so.

Don't you think maturity is founded on the separation of our private impressions of and feelings about persons from our judgments of their attributes?

You certainly can say that again. Professionalism is a kind of maturity that pertains to a subset of our activities. What puzzles me is that there seems to be little recognition of that very important principle.

You shouldn't make such a universal statement. It's your little living and working environment that you are talking about.

There is basic courtesy that should be observed regardless of our feelings toward that person.

We talked along this line some time ago.

I recently discovered that for people...

In your little environment, ahem.

All right, in my teeny-weeny environment, enforcement of rules are subject to how much positive feelings the enforcer has about the subjects.

"According to the official schedule, it is your turn to do this not-so-fun job, but okay, I know you are busy, so I will do it for you." That kind of a thing?

I would say so if the person is under pressure, although s/he has not been slacking off, and that to every such person.

People around you are totally confused because you help whom you like and don't like in the same way.

There are times when I want the people that I like to be strictly rule-abiding with me, although there are not many who defy rules and whom I like.

If I recall well, the willingness to be considerate and courteous is not only related to the feelings that we have for the persons involved, but also how repairable the relationships are with those people.

For some, the desire to go by the accepted rules is proportional to the fragility of relationships that they have with the parties involved. In extreme cases, they would go along with anything if they see that the person who is in front needs to be made happy.

Comrade, your hands are trembling with anger...

I tell you, it's total breakdown of communication! You would think that you have gotten an okay to something, only to learn later that it was a no, for example. It creates an anarchic and chaotic world. We have rules and laws precisely so as to be fair and predictable when we make important judgments.

You would doubt whether such persons have any principle.

It's balls that they don't have.

Hush, comrade.

Should I say instead that the ones that they have are shriveled up and about to fall off? They fail to understand that liking a person should neither be necessary nor sufficient to be ethical with her/him. Similarly, we do not have to pretend that we like someone in order to act ethically toward that person. If we do, it would be...

Comes your favorite word of the season, right? The one that starts with an 'h' and ends with a 'y'? There's a 'p' in it, a 'c' in it...

When people turn chummy because they want me to do something for them, I feel as if they were trying a cheap trick on me. If it is in my power to do it and if I see it necessary and reasonable, I would. It has no relation with whether I like her/him or not!

They are again totally confused, because they were nice to you and you agreed to carry out the task, but you look as if you were about to blow fire out of your mouth to scorch them.

The same people think that if they shower me with praises I would become fond of them.

Of course, they shouldn't lie.

They have absolutely no idea that they are showing the ends of their diapers as they walk around...