Too little
Forcing a breakthrough
I must solve the ending before I leave this seat.
Urgency makes it harder to hear what the song needs.
Patience
The song is short. Its ending has ambitions for an entire concert.
A willingness to allow worthwhile processes their necessary time.
Patience gives a worthwhile creative process the time it needs to develop. A melody, story or design can require several encounters before you hear what belongs. Return, listen and try again without demanding that every session produce a breakthrough. This is active interest in something still becoming clear.
Patience gives room for a work to develop
You are writing a small song on a keyboard. The tune ends simply, but you keep adding a magnificent flourish that seems unwilling to go home. Over several evenings you play the phrase, leave it and return. Today you cross out the crowded run of notes and try a quieter ending. The pause between attempts has helped you hear the song you were trying to finish.
Finding the balance in Patience
An illustrative everyday situation
Return to a short song over several sessions and try a simpler ending instead of forcing an elaborate finish.
A fitting response
Allowing development
I will listen again, try this ending and return tomorrow.
The work receives both attention and time.
Pursued too far
Waiting for a visitation
The perfect tune will arrive when I am ready.
Waiting replaces the attempts through which an idea develops.
Returning can change what you are able to hear.
When the situation changes
After several returns, the ending works, but you keep postponing the recording. Time has done its part. Choose a version and record it; a completed attempt can teach something that another indefinite pause cannot.
What Patience makes possible
You can stay interested through an unresolved passage and enjoy the gradual discovery of a form. A useful pause may let a familiar phrase sound different on your return. Progress can also come through repeated attempts in which a small relationship becomes clearer before the whole is settled.
Patience in ordinary life
A story still growing
Leave a difficult transition overnight, then return to it with a question about what the reader needs to understand. Try a version rather than waiting for a miraculous answer.
An unfamiliar movement
Rehearse a short dance phrase over several sessions. Allow perception and movement time to meet, noticing one change at a time.
Nearby virtues, different work
Diligence
Diligence supplies the work. Patience allows necessary time without demanding an immediate result.
Curiosity
Curiosity asks what the process might reveal. Patience gives you time to notice the answer.
Patience and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Romantic postponement
Waiting forever for inspiration is a counterfeit of Patience. Genuine Patience includes a return to the work.
Counterfeit: Grinding on
Repeating a passage without listening can look patient. Give the attempt a question, and allow a pause when another immediate repetition teaches little.
How to cultivate Patience
Identify what is still developing and what you could try now.
Make an attentive attempt, then choose a useful interval.
Return and notice what has become clearer before deciding the next step.
Try it today
Patience does not mean working through pain or tolerating mistreatment. Adapt materials, pace and arrangements to your circumstances.
Choose an unfinished passage or idea. Give it an attentive attempt, allowing a provisional result. Arrange a concrete return and compare what you notice then. The interval can be hours or days when the work calls for it.
In a diplomatic conversation
Give an unfinished idea time to develop.
Questions worth returning to
What am I beginning to hear or see through repeated attempts?
What would make my next return useful?
Keep the practice proportionate
Patience does not mean working through pain or tolerating mistreatment. Adapt materials, pace and arrangements to your circumstances.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Keats describes a literary capacity to remain with uncertainty rather than force an explanation. Here it illuminates allowing an unresolved work time to develop; it is not advice to disregard evidence in factual decisions.
It argues, indeed, no small strength of mind to persevere in habits of industry, without the pleasure of perceiving those advances; which, like the hand of a clock, whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation.
Reynolds describes improvement that is too gradual to see each day. The comparison helps a learner return to the work without demanding a visible breakthrough every session.
Let it wait and ripen,
Mr. March advises Jo not to cut her novel merely to secure publication. The advice is one voice in a difficult family discussion; allowing a work to mature is a choice to examine, not a reason to postpone every submission.
If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you.
Schumann describes musical ideas continuing beyond an immediate practice session. A pause can belong to composition when the maker returns to develop what has emerged; spontaneous arrival is not a requirement or a promise.
Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like small talk;
After a stalled chapter and a change of place, Stevenson returns to Treasure Island. This is one writer’s experience, not a guaranteed cure for difficulty; the important action is returning after an interval.
The new deed is yet a part of life,—remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays · THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. · Edna H. L. Turpin edition, 1907 · excerpt
Emerson describes experience becoming available to reflection over time. A subject may need an interval before a writer can see what to make of it.
When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a weariness,—he has always the resource to live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays · THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. · Edna H. L. Turpin edition, 1907 · excerpt
Emerson places creative thought within a larger rhythm of living. A pause can include ordinary experience that later gives the work new substance.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fourteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. Begin with a piece you want to make.