Whatever happened to patience? I think it went out the window with the baby and bathwater when smartphones took over our lives and brought the world into our lives with taps of our fingertips.
At some point in my 35 years (down to a baker’s dozen of days before I hit 36) I knew I had patience. In college during karate class I sat seiza* in bare feet on wooden dance floors without complaint. I grew up with 56k dialup connections that took forever to complete a download. (I have a good Thanksgiving story I will save for later use about Napster and dialup. For now just understand my connection frustrations with the internet run deep.)
Yet somewhere in the intervening years following trials and tribulations in high school and college, my patience is slowly dwindling down. I am restless and bored by what always seems like the second verse, same as the first locally. I pace around the house a lot more than I should be, unable to get comfortable enough to write the number of stories I want to in a day, versus those I actually get done.
I’m not just losing patience with myself, but others in recent days and weeks. I’m much louder with people I like but who listen to me gripe in recent days. I find myself curt and otherwise quiet with those who I find aren’t measuring up to their potential (also myself included among that category.)
I can’t stand what I find to be a slacking work ethic across the board in the service industries around the county. I internally lose my mind when I hear people finding excuses for not fixing real problems.
Yet as I preached in recent days, perseverance is key to overcoming obstacles. Including those self-imposed by our attitudes and preconceived notions of
I was in the line at Captain D’s on Sunday night – behind I believe one of the many friends I have in the community, Janice Stewart. It took what seemed like a very long time (more than 30 minutes) to get my order. I found myself like in most times when stuck in drive-thru lines wanting to pound my head against the steering wheel in absolute frustration.
The oxymoron of fast food remains one I can’t stand, for it is a fallacy of language created as a marketing term. What’s so speedy about it? You drive to the restaurant and back to the house with at least (in Cedartown) a five minute wait in good circumstances for food, and in really bad traffic you’ll wait 30-40 minutes.
So I waited, and moved Janis the Jeep a car length with each order filled in front of me, then exited in a reasonable amount of time when I got to the window and paid.
I was probably less than polite by this point, seeing as I had sat for a good while and hunger caused my stomach to make those strange noises when it begins to move to full on hanger. The time wasn’t completely wasted thanks to HBO Max and the Season 5 episode of The West Wing titled “The Benign Prerogative.” At least I had good television to keep me company.
My point being this: there was no real reason for me to get angry at these folks getting close to closing on a Sunday for taking a while to make dinner. I can’t fault them for wanting to get the cleanup over with and wanting to go home. I know that feeling.
Yet we all get so caught up in the concept of something like fast food, high speed internet and near instant gratification thanks to the ease of shopping on Amazon online or Walmart in person that forget to stop and smell the flowers. Two day shipping for shopping online means the delay is not that long, and you don’t have to show your face to anyone but the guy making deliveries. Not to mention all these streaming services that bring movies into the home with no extra cost other than the monthly subscription fees.
We’ve forgotten how to slow down some, and I’m included in that group.
So here’s something I’d like us all to try: take a deep breath, count to 10, and remember that we are all humans. We make mistakes. Tasks that need to be done take time to complete correctly. A meal isn’t cooked in two minutes (well, not a good one) and Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Instead of trying to lose our minds over the small stuff and letting the bigger problems go, maybe we should flip that formula. Start working on the issues that matter, and letting the little problems that crop up in life fall to the wayside.
That’s all I’ve got for this morning. I’ll be back tomorrow with something much more topical.
-Kevin the Editor
*Seiza is a traditional sitting stance in Japan that requires one to sit with their legs tucked underneath in such a way you rest your weight on the bottom of your feet and the top of your feet on the floor. It is not comfortable to do unless you have a pillow of some kind. Try it out. That’s a test of patience.
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