Too little
Hurry the search
Come on. It must be on your phone somewhere.
Pressure adds another task to someone already trying to find the answer.
Patience
Give shared processes the time they actually need.
A willingness to allow worthwhile processes their necessary time.
Patience lets a worthwhile shared process take the time it needs. In a city, you may be the person waiting or the worker making time for someone else. A useful pause allows the next step to happen: a question understood, a reference found, an order checked. You can keep that purpose in view, offer help when the process stalls and tell others what to expect.
Patience gives shared time a more human pace
You are working the morning counter. A customer has ordered ahead, but the pickup reference has disappeared into their phone. The weather is available. So are seventeen photographs of a dog. You give them a moment, tell the next customer you will be right with them and ask whether the order might be under their name. The coffee has not become less urgent; the search has become more useful.
Finding the balance in Patience
Give a customer time to find a pickup reference, then offer another way to locate the order.
A fitting response
Allow time and offer a route
Take a moment. I can also look under your name.
A pause and a useful alternative let the order move toward completion.
Pursued too far
Let the search drift
Keep scrolling; we can all wait until it turns up.
Waiting continues after another method would serve the customer and the queue better.
The point of patience is to let worthwhile work happen. Its measure is the task being served, not the number of minutes endured.
What Patience makes possible
A city runs on thousands of small exchanges between people with different schedules and levels of familiarity. A worker who allows a useful pause can turn a flustered search into a completed order. A customer who allows the same room helps make that service possible. Patience gives a process enough time to work while leaving everyone able to ask what happens next.
Patience in ordinary life
A library return
Let the worker finish replacing a label on the book ahead of yours. Your slim volume can wait beside the tower.
A delayed bus
Check the posted update and decide whether to wait or take another route. While you stay, let boarding passengers finish their turn.
Nearby virtues, different work
Equanimity
Patience allows a process time; Equanimity concerns your steadiness as circumstances change.
Courtesy
Courtesy shapes how you treat the people in the queue; Patience lets their business have its duration.
Patience and its counterfeits
The silent countdown
Staring at the customer while counting seconds keeps impatience active behind a patient expression. Look for the step that would help.
Waiting as proof of goodness
Letting a stalled search continue indefinitely makes endurance the goal. Offer another way forward.
How to cultivate Patience
Identify the useful step that needs time.
Give a clear moment to finish it, and keep anyone else waiting informed.
Offer another route when the process stops making progress.
Try it today
During an ordinary shared task, allow someone time to finish a useful step. If they get stuck, offer one practical alternative.
Questions worth returning to
- What could this pause make possible?
- Has waiting become less useful than a question or another approach?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
We want a thing done, but we cannot wait to do it.
A. G. Gardiner · Leaves in the Wind · On Sawing Wood
In “On Sawing Wood,” Gardiner discovers that forcing the pace defeats the work. The sentence catches the impatient visitor’s mistake: wanting completion does not remove the steps that completion requires.
What a feeling of reserve there is in the beautiful leisureliness of his action!
A. G. Gardiner · Leaves in the Wind · On Sawing Wood
Gardiner watches an experienced mower whose measured rhythm accomplishes more than frantic effort. The admiration belongs to skilled work at its proper pace, a useful way to look at the person serving a queue.
We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Introduction
Addams is considering how social ideals become actual conduct. Her distinction between process and result explains why a worthwhile aim still needs a workable method and enough time to carry it through.
But it is the easier for a man to wait patiently when he has friends who love him, and ask for nothing better than to help him through, so far as it lies in their power.
George Eliot · Middlemarch · Chapter LXIII
Farebrother says this to Lydgate, whose affairs are troubling him. Eliot gives patience a social support: the person waiting may find it easier when others remain helpful and well disposed.
Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it.
Charles Lamb · Elia and The Last Essays of Elia · Old China
In “Old China,” Elia lets Bridget finish an unusually long recollection. His restraint gives her thought time to unfold. At a busy counter, allowing someone to complete a search or explanation can serve the same purpose.
The conviction remained with me, that however long a time might be required to establish justice in the new relationships of our raw industrialism, it would never be stable until it had received the sanction of those upon whom the present situation presses so harshly.
Jane Addams · Twenty Years at Hull-House · Boarding-School Ideals
After a difficult industrial arbitration, Addams recognizes that a durable settlement needs the consent of those bearing its costs. The passage gives patience a purpose beyond delay: allowing the people concerned enough time to take part.
He is extremely impatient, and sits there for the purpose of keeping a sharp eye on the cad, with whom he generally holds a running dialogue.
Charles Dickens · Sketches by Boz · Scenes, Omnibuses
Dickens’s regular omnibus passenger keeps up a running commentary on the conductor. The comic portrait exposes a familiar temptation: supervising another person’s work can feel productive while merely adding pressure.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.