Reference reading
Impatience
A worthwhile process can become intolerable because it takes the time it actually needs.
Habitual unwillingness to allow the time or process that a worthwhile purpose reasonably requires.
Imagine this: A printmaker lifts a sheet to check the ink, lays it down, lifts it again and discovers a growing collection of fingerprints. The waiting has been shortened; the drying has not.
How the pattern works
Impatience refuses the time or process a worthwhile purpose reasonably requires. Mastery should arrive before practice, understanding before sustained reading, public change before the patient work of organizing it. Delay is treated as an insult rather than a feature to examine.
Urgency can be warranted. A deadline, a serious need or an opportunity may demand prompt action. The distinction is whether the duration is necessary to the purpose. Impatience tries to abolish that necessary duration without changing the conditions that make it necessary.
What it costs the work
A work is released before it can carry its claims, a conversation is forced toward a conclusion before participants understand the disagreement, or a beginner is judged by an imagined finished performance. Necessary rework can lengthen the very process the impatient response wanted to shorten.
A distinction worth keeping
Recklessness discounts significant consequences, while Impatience centers intolerance of duration. A person can be impatient about a low-risk task. Sloth avoids effort; an impatient learner may practice intensely but reject the time learning requires. Patience does not require accepting avoidable delay or an institution’s convenient excuse for inaction.
What a useful response can change
Ask what the interval is doing. Ink drying, evidence being checked and participants considering a proposal involve different processes, each of which may or may not justify the particular wait.
Distinguish what can proceed now from what must wait. Preparing the next sheet can serve the work while this one dries; demanding that wet ink behave as dry ink cannot.
Where a delay is avoidable or unfair, address its cause directly. A reasoned challenge to unnecessary obstruction is compatible with allowing the duration a worthwhile process actually needs.
Questions for reflection
- What would have to change for this step to require less time?
- Am I objecting to a real obstruction or to the existence of duration?
Other perspectives
By what forethought, pains, and patience, can we make endurable those strange dwellings—the basest, the ugliest, and the most inconvenient that men have ever built for themselves, and which our own haste, necessity, and stupidity, compel almost all of us to live in?
William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source
Morris treats haste as one contributor to poor surroundings and asks about patient improvement. The article likewise distinguishes necessary duration from tolerating an avoidable obstruction.
Every man’s progress is through a succession of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source
Emerson describes development through successive teachers. An influence can be genuinely important without providing instant or final mastery.