Patience

Why on earth did I wait so long to write about patience? Perhaps I was just patiently waiting for the right time? Sorry, I’ll see myself out. In all seriousness though, doesn’t it seem like patience has gone the way of common sense? It seems as though fewer and fewer people have either these days and it seems like a scary combination to not have either one. I see it every day, mostly with people in vehicles in such a hurry to get somewhere they will try to squeeze their way around just to turn fifteen seconds sooner (this one happened to me just this morning). This just baffles me.

To be fair, I did grow up just as technology was starting to peek into what we now know today. The beginning of my internet experience did include dial up, but not for long. We also had just a single phone in the house, but to be fair it was cordless. There were still commercials on t.v. but we had more than just three channels and a remote. I remember using Limewire to download tons of pirated music on the family desktop in the living room. I didn’t get my first cellular phone until I was sixteen and it was an old Nokia brick that I threw on multiple occasions and never worried if it would still work. Today, as a father in my mid thirties, I have a personal and work cell phone on me most of the time, decently fast internet not only to my laptop but also to the two cell phones, one of which has my attention for more time than I care to admit, commercial free t.v. streaming to my smart t.v. and a nine year old daughter who is asking for her own cell phone because other kids her age already have one.

As much as I’d like to blame it all on just technology, the rest of our culture has jumped on the bandwagon as well. Going out to get fast food was a treat when I was young, and to be fair, it is far more available where I live now compared to where I grew up, but it is to the point that I have limited myself to fast food once a week when I have my children. Thanks to popular sites such as Amazon, we can have just about anything shipped to our house within a few days, things that we used to wait for months to go get. Our culture is all about ease of access and when something takes longer than we think it should, we complain. My children start fussing when our order at the drive through takes longer than a couple of minutes and start groaning as soon as the loading icon appears on the t.v. There is an old saying that says good things come to those who wait, and there is a better saying that says good things come to those who work hard, but are those two sayings so different? Anybody who has worked hard for something in their life knows that it takes more than just one day of hard work to accomplish what you want. It takes months and even years for your hard work to pay off. Those who work hard day in and day out have patience to see them through to the end, as well as other positive attributes.

Now I don’t claim to be an expert on patience, I have two simple things that can set me off pretty quick; liars and idiot drivers. The latter one made me feel like a real heel not too long ago. One afternoon after work I was driving home with my children and came up to a stop sign behind a nineties Ford Mustang. It appeared they were waiting on another vehicle to go through the intersection and even had their turn signal on (a big plus in my book), but after the other vehicle made it through the intersection, they stayed right where they were for close to a minute before taking off. Naturally I was a little irritated at this point and had made a couple PG13 comments by then. They happened to turn the same direction I was going and just a few short blocks away we came to another stop sign. To be fair, I should have figured out what was going on well before this, but I was being a little impatient. I watched the Mustang start to go and immediately stop, which is when I realized that these were younger kids driving and that was a manual transmission car. I instantly felt horrible for being impatient earlier as I know the struggle of learning to drive a manual transmission car. That moment humbled me and taught me that we don’t always know what is going on, but we should be patient and approach every situation calm and collected, which is something I still struggle with every now and then.

In a culture dominated by instant gratification, we need to remember that anything worth doing, is worth doing right, and to do it right takes time and patience. As an at the moment single father, one of my main goals in life is to raise my children to be better than me, and I firmly believe that if we can teach the next generation to to patient with one another and themselves, then the rest of the good attributes we wish to pass on will fall into place as well.

Once again, I appreciate the time you guys take in reading my random thoughts and would love to hear what you have to think as well.