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...