Losing patience with patience

Is patience part of loving? If so, why does it feel like we don't value it.

Certain kinds of advice always end up being washed ashore on a land named Irrelevant. A place where platitudes reside and generic trying-to-be-helpfuls are often forgotten. As soon as someone says such things, our brains put the advice on a direct flight to Irrelevance Island, without seeing if there might actually be something in it for us. Things like gratitude, presence, calm down, don’t worry about it, and drink more water are all over there sipping on mai tais; waiting for someone to make use of them. Patience is lurking over there too. No-one likes that guy. Who wants to be told to just be patient in the midst of waiting for something? Not a single body, that’s who.

It’s sad really as these molecules of advice are only the source of mass irritation because they’ve been overused. Not because they lack substance or meaning. Presence is everything. Gratitude is vital. The call to calm is important. And, yeah hydration is only intrinsic to our very survival. We just don’t like to hear it on repeat. These things are often said in the most annoying of ways too. I think we can all agree that as a people we’ve worked out that telling anyone to calm down when they’re as infuriated as someone being splashed by dank puddle water from a passing car, isn’t helpful. In fact, it’s so grossly unhelpful that hearing the words “calm down” has the superpower of inciting more anger than the original source of fury. I want to rescue “be patient” from a lifetime sat next to “calm down”, as it really doesn’t deserve it. I think patience is central to our humanity actually, just in the same way that we collectively throb and salivate about the concept of love.

There’s a tendency to think about patience mainly when we’re doing the opposite. When we’re in a state of wanting, waiting, desiring, and hoping. There were so many times in the past when I dragged my silly little fingers down on my inbox to refresh emails, waiting for news of the good variety. It’s staring at the train departure board and seeing that the train is coming in 10 minutes, and wondering if we stare at the number for long enough, it might miraculously go down to 2 minutes. It’s waiting impatiently for red traffic lights to shimmy into green. It’s waiting for our entire lives to change.

The inner impatience sneaks up on us like day slowing into night. We crush ourselves with the impossible weight of wondering “when”, deciphering “how”, and looking for “what”. Asking questions of ourselves and life as if we’ll ever know the answer. The answer sometimes gives us comfort, sometimes it doesn’t. I had an MRI scan once that took an hour and a half. I didn’t know it would take that long. Ever the good girl and with a high tolerance for suffering, I didn’t think to ask at any point how long I had left. It was pretty horrific and I just endured it, wondering helplessly if it would ever end. No frame of reference or understanding of time. As if I was floating in a boundless space waiting for a voice to say it was all done. Panic button in hand, I only thought I could press it if I was truly about to take my last breath. I didn’t think I should press if I was merely freaking the fuck out.

I learned my lesson. On my subsequent scans, I always ask how long it will take and for regular time updates during it. There’s comfort in knowing. It somehow makes the situation easier. I can connect to patience in these situations, when I have some idea of how long I must be patient for. I don’t count down the minutes, I simply distract myself with endless mind games and mental frivolities. Life isn’t an MRI scan though, where there’s a planned and certain ending.

Inner patience is a tricky one, it asks us to find ways to be gentle, to trust when we may not know when or how, and to live life instead of waiting for life. Nothing is forever-lasting. When I find myself in periods of impatience, I remember the life asking to be lived right now, instead of succumbing to the distractions of prioritising what might come next. A continuous practice of sitting in now instead of when. I realised that so much of the depression I found myself in last year, was waiting for “when” things would come. Money, opportunities, success. The impatience wasn’t even an excitement about the future, it was actually masquerading as the fear that those things would never come. My impatience was fear. It was also sadness and uncertainty. I was mentally tapping my nails across a hard surface in anticipation, when that wasn’t at all what I was feeling. It covered a truth that I didn’t want to admit to, that I temporarily lost sight of if anything good was coming my way. I had this itch inside me that made me want to get to midnight in 6 hours, birth before 9 months, and reach December without going through all the other months first.

Slowly I came back to myself, which actually meant having patience with myself and patience with life. I am someone who is deeply present, it’s one of my favourite things about myself, so I know I’m out of balance when I find myself in the throes of impatience and focusing on what’s next. I released this idea of doing things for the destination and focused on all the steps in between, even the babiest of steps. Connecting more deeply than I ever had done, on what I need to see, feel, and discover and not as a means of getting there, but of being here. I shifted out of waiting and into expecting. If I’m waiting for success for example, there’s a shadow of impatience and uncertainty. If I’m expecting success, it feels as if I can let go of my attachment to when and how it may arrive, and instead choose to trust that it will.

Expectation clears out the fearfulness of “will it” or “won’t it” happen. I’ve been returning to the obnoxious knowing I’ve always had, that slipped away last year. I’m expecting magic to happen, in any damn time it chooses to happen, so I can just relax and enjoy the ride. Impatience doesn’t have anything to sink its jagged teeth into when life is happening around it. I was single for nearly 7 years (and no I’m not counting any situationships, they’ve been scratched off the record). For the vast majority of those years, I was having the time of my life. Mainly because I wasn’t kissed by impatience. I didn’t declare my singledom as a mere waiting room. I was simply living life, joyfully, abundantly and soulfully. If someone were to come along they’d come. Perception was everything. I wasn’t anxious about if I’d meet someone, I didn’t care to know when, I just chose to live my life fully.

Patience asks us to expand our capacity for discomfort. Not the survival kind of discomfort, mind you. It’s impossible finding patience when you’re waiting for an ambulance to arrive, or you’re in unimaginable pain and waiting for it to subside. Yes, we can find ways to regulate, soften and be held during the discomfort, but imagine 999 telling you to be patient. Nope. No thank you. It’s one thing being patient for money to land in your account if you already have enough money to get by. It’s completely different if you don’t have any money, and you’re waiting for it to be able to eat. What I’m thinking about here is easing into the transient states of discomfort which are marked by having a sense of urgency, or a resistance to slow growth.

I did some tarot readings at an event for my book publisher last week, and during those sessions, many people were speaking about how much they were struggling right now, by their feeling of being stuck. That work, life, and their goals had slowed down. Things weren’t happening or they were waiting for things to happen, which as I’ve mentioned, is often code for the fear that those things won’t happen. We spoke about how we can reframe this idea of being stuck into one which asks us, if we’ve been gifted this time and space to breathe, reconnect to ourselves, maybe to pivot or just to be, then how will we show up for this time, instead of labelling it as being “stuck”?

Because, it’s easy to slip into impatience and resent those times when we feel like life isn’t happening fast enough. So many parts and systems in our society benefit from our impatience. Fast fashion. Fast food. Fast internet. Fast humans. If we lived in a fundamentally patient society would we have next day delivery? Same day delivery? Within 30 minutes deliveries? Would we have new shows dropping an entire season at a time instead of being shown week to week? Would we have trains coming every few minutes in our cities? If we cultivated the value of patience, would fashion have more seasons than the actual calendar? We live in a time of 2 minute Tik Tok videos being fast forwarded, to accommodate for our dwindling attention spans. YouTube videos played on x2 speed because who has time for people to take a breath and contemplate their words before they say them. Many things would cease to exist if we had patience.

Yet, it’s all about value, isn’t it. Maybe we don’t really value the things that we speed up. The converse of all of this, is pretty wild, as everything seems to have a queue attached to it these days. There’s so much hype for restaurants, bakeries, beauty pop-ups and niche coffee shops that you need to block off a few hours in the hopes of being able to consume anything outside of the house. Thanks to social currency, waiting in line for bagels, pizza, and baked goods is the norm. Queues in Aldi for celebrity branded energy drinks. Waiting. So much waiting. For hours. Hours, friends. I’m a reservation girly and raised on the principle of “we can make that at home”, so I refuse to line up for most things. I love a cookie, but I ain’t lining up for one. But, isn’t it fascinating that in this fast-paced world, we seem to have an increased patience for waiting for certain things and not others. Perhaps it’s because waiting in line at these viral shops and eateries has a greater return on investment. There’s a desire to be seen, in the know, and ultimately to belong. For humankind, that probably makes it worth waiting for, right?

It’s our external patience that brings up the most for me, though. This is my favourite TFL ad. I think I first saw it during COVID, as an attempt to get people to have more patience with the differing rates we were all finding our place in very traumatic and unusual circumstances. The mask-wearers and the mask-haters. The vaccine takers and the vaccine refusers. The social distancing followers and the social distancing ignorers. There wasn’t a lot of compassion happening, and this ad was a welcome reminder for us all. It also applies to all manner of getting on the tube activities. The stomping ground for impatience. For me, this ad extends so far beyond the sweaty carpeted seats of a tube line. It extends to all parts of life.

I went to NYC with my mum last year, who has a walking stick. When she was walking slowly and being careful when going down the stairs at subway stations, she’d often tell people to overtake her or apologise for being slow. In the city that supposedly never sleeps and thrives on its busyness, whenever this happened people would calmly and ever so patiently tell her to take her time. They’d remind her that there’s no rush, not to worry. It makes all the difference.

Impatience with others seems to find its playground online, and I wonder if some of the rage that’s so rife isn’t even anger but actually some form of impatience. Impatience that people aren’t thinking the same thoughts as us, in the time and way we want them to. That the world hasn’t changed as fast enough as our desires, care and education has. Systems aren’t changing. It’s infuriating when we need change to happen now, and it isn’t. When we can’t always direct our rage at governments and leaders, that rage can be easily misdirected at whoever you happen to scroll past instead. There’s an impatience lingering behind those calls for people to “wake up” that we so often see. We need to act urgently in situations that require urgency, elsewhere, where’s the space for patience? Or as the advert says, “please remember some of us need more time than others.” Firstly, not everyone will see the world the same way as we do (which by the way, is really okay), not everyone will change, and maybe they might just not know or feel something in the timing that we have been able to know.

I do struggle with impatient people. When I see the people pushing through crowds, speeding down streets just to end up in the same traffic as you, people running for trains and knocking people over. The huffs and puffs when someone is walking too slow for their liking. The “I’m soooo busy” and therefore assuming they’re busier than everyone else, has such a tinge of self-importance that I don’t care for. But, alas, I’m trying to be more patient with the perpetually impatient. If I want to do something creatively, I am impatient, well I’d rather say, excited. I’ll order embroidery kits, cake decorating kits, new notebooks and the equipment I need immediately, so I can get started. When it comes to the rest of life, I’m of the opinion that it’ll come when it comes.

I really believe that patience is incredibly valuable. We’re asked to learn to love everyone and that humanity can be saved through love. I agree, I believe that. But, isn’t patience a core part of love? In friendships and romantic relationships, with our family; think about how much space opens up when patience is invited in. With aging grandparents love is inevitable, but patience is actually what is required. When they’re forgetting things, patience is required to repeat yourself as many times as necessary. When they’re not listening to health advice, patience is required. When you’re adjusting to being greeted with new versions of people you love, it takes patience to meet them with open hearts and minds.

Patience is love. Patience is giving people we love time and space to sit with things, grow into things, understand things, to understand us. Patience to figure things out, and to figure each other out. I want to be slow with people. The same is true of potential strangers. First interactions, swipes or dates with someone can fall into the trap of expedition, as that’s what love is idealised as in rom-coms. Lacking the patience to get to know someone and wanting to spin straight into certainty and milestones. The intensity that feels like love, when it might just be a state of dysregulation. Knowing to love people takes as much time as it needs to take. It takes patience. We’ve been conditioned into rushing into love. As soon as you kiss someone people want to know if it’s serious, will there be babies and proposals, will you be moving in together. “When you know, you know” they say. Bile surfaces everytime I hear it. Why are we in a rush to know or feel anything? It doesn’t make love any less sacred when there’s patience.

I know in this chapter of my life that I’m prioritising patience with myself. I’m not doing the whole waiting thing anymore. I’m assuming and expecting wonderful things to happen for me, because I’m not allowing things from the past to define my future. I’m not making assumptions out of myself or anything. I won’t write my story or even worse write myself out of my own story, without living it first. I’m focused on feeling into who I am and trusting, believing and being tethered to who I am, instead of to circumstances and things outside my control. If things don’t happen, if disappointment comes to tickle my back, I trust it just wasn’t supposed to happen in that time, way or circumstance.

I’m committed to being patient with others. Giving people space and time in a world that forces us to move. We simultaneously have not enough time and plenty of time. We never know when we will drink our last sip of life, we never now how close we are to the beginning or the end and it sure isn’t helpful to continuously dwell on it. I try to live my life somewhere in the middle. Not putting things off, not delaying the things I know I want to do, but also savouring each moment of my precious stay here on Earth.

There’s a pleasure in not looking at the clock when you’re doing what you love and also in not begging the clock to move faster, so you can have what you want.