Too little
Rushing the story
“The first stretch is exciting enough; let’s call it the pattern.”
The appeal of an early result replaces the duration the question requires.
Patience
Give a worthwhile question the time it needs.
A willingness to allow worthwhile processes their necessary time.
Patience sustains inquiry while the answer is still forming. It lets an observation take its necessary time and makes an unresolved question bearable enough to examine carefully. Waiting can include preparing, comparing and deciding when to try again.
Patience gives time for a real answer
The first part of the observation series rises sharply. A colleague has already thought of a striking title. The planned series covers a whole season, however, and the early pattern may not last. You keep the schedule, check the records already collected and prepare the comparison the later observations will make possible. The title waits on a sticky note; the work does not.
Finding the balance in Patience
An early fluctuation tempts a team to announce a conclusion before a worthwhile observation series has run its intended course.
A fitting response
Sustaining the inquiry
“This is an interesting start. We can check what we have while the series develops.”
The team makes useful progress without treating an interim pattern as a settled conclusion.
Pursued too far
Duration as a badge
“We must continue exactly as planned, whatever changes.”
Persistence loses judgment when new evidence, feasibility or responsibilities call for reconsideration.
Necessary time belongs to the question being asked. A schedule deserves a reason, and a changed reason deserves a review.
What Patience makes possible
Patience makes longer patterns available to understanding. Repeated observations can distinguish a short fluctuation from a durable change, while time between readings allows records to be checked and questions refined. A team can remain interested without demanding a fresh success at every meeting. The eventual account contains something that the first exciting week could not supply.
Patience in ordinary life
A difficult response
Give a collaborator time to examine a complicated question, agreeing when to return to it.
A slow reading
Restate the part of an argument you understand and return to the difficult step after consulting a useful explanation.
Nearby virtues, different work
Diligence
Diligence attends to the work you can do; Patience allows necessary processes and unresolved questions their time.
Composure
Composure helps recover a deliberate response to the cloud’s arrival; Patience sustains the longer interval afterward.
Patience and its counterfeits
Counterfeit Patience: an endlessly deferred review
“We need more time” can postpone every decision about whether a series still serves its question. Patient work includes an agreed occasion to examine progress and changing conditions.
How to cultivate Patience
Name what becomes knowable only over the required interval.
Choose useful interim work and a sensible review point.
Distinguish impatience for a result from a sound reason to alter the plan.
Try it today
Choose a modest question that genuinely needs time. Write what the interval contributes, one useful task you can do now and when you will review the next step.
Questions worth returning to
- What could the later observations tell us that the first ones cannot?
- Has the reason for continuing changed?
Keep the practice proportionate
Workable hours, permissions and other responsibilities remain part of a sensible plan. This reflection does not instruct you to continue a study against relevant oversight or new evidence.
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
I suspected it to be a comet; but a haziness coming on, it was not possible to satisfy myself as to its motion till this evening.
Herschel distinguishes her first suspicion from the later observation that supported it. Waiting has a specific purpose here: movement must become observable before the object can be identified.
The instrument was fairly mounted when the clouds mounted to keep it company, and the comet and I again parted.
Maria Mitchell · Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals · Comet observations, diary extract
Mitchell records the practical frustration of following a comet through interrupted observations. Her wry account leaves the missing view missing, while keeping her interest in the next opportunity alive.
The method can be told in a few sentences; yet it took a hundred years to determine it with any degree of accuracy—and a hundred years, not of the average work of mankind in science, but a hundred years during which able minds were bent to the problem.
Maria Mitchell · Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals · Chapter XI
Mitchell contrasts a short explanation with the accumulated work behind determining the moon’s distance. The ease of telling a method can conceal the time required to make it useful.
But in the pursuit of truth, scientific or other, they count for very little, unless they are supplemented by that long-continued, patient "intending of the mind," as Newton phrased it, which makes very little show in Examinations.
Thomas Henry Huxley · Science and Education · Universities: Actual And Ideal
Huxley contrasts quick examination performance with sustained inquiry. Some valuable understanding grows through attention that produces little immediate display.
The salient quality of Faraday's scientific character reveals itself from beginning to end of these volumes; a union of ardour and patience — the one prompting the attack, the other holding him on to it, till defeat was final or victory assured.
John Tyndall · Fragments of Science · Vol. I, XVIII. Life And Letters Of Faraday.
Tyndall describes Faraday’s energy and endurance as partners. Sustained inquiry needs reasons to continue and a willingness to recognize an answer, including an unwelcome one.
In this case five observations are sufficient for the determination of the orbit, provided they be exact; but the quantities to be measured are so minute, that it is only by a very long series of observations that accuracy can be attained.
Mary Somerville · On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences · Section XXXVI.
Somerville distinguishes a theoretical minimum from the practical work of measuring a tiny effect. A short mathematical requirement can conceal a long observational task.
I am trying for time in magnetic action, and do not despair of reaching it, even though it may be only that of light. Nous verrons.
Michael Faraday · Personal Recollections · Faraday to Somerville, January 17, 1859
Faraday closes his 1859 letter to Somerville with an unresolved investigation and “we shall see.” The question remains a purpose for future work, not an answer already possessed.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.