I have never been a patient person.
I would go so far as to say that I am a bit of an action person. I get an idea and I like to do it straight away. I’m not good at hanging around. And I am certainly not good at waiting.
But that seems to be something of a necessity these days. My husband would see the capacity to wait and be patient while you are at it, as a virtue. And he is not the only person who regularly tests me on that score.
I do spend a lot of time hanging around. My theory is that waiting for someone is tantamount to theft. In waiting, that person has just stolen time that you will never recover.
But virtue it must be and, like anything worthwhile, it comes back to test until you have figured out its value.
I’ve noticed that waiting is a bit of a thing these days.
Who hasn’t phoned a business, only to be answered with a recorded message telling you how important you are and the receiver can’t wait to talk to you. In fact the receiver wants to talk to you so badly that they first want to share lots of inane information about the company and speak calmly to the beast via a dulcet voice for 30 minutes first. If you are lucky enough to score an actual person when you phone, it is most likely that the person’s first words will be “Do you mind holding?”.
I just want to scream at them. My internal voice yells out “No, I do mind waiting. In fact, I hate waiting. I don’t have time to wait. I don’t have the patience to wait. And my phone is running out of credit.” But you are already on hold before you can answer the original question.
It’s easy to fob off strangers. We all do it, masking our busyness or our slowness or our ineptitude with platitudes and professional tone. And now, I find our children have learned from the experts.
Ask a child to do something and the first thing they say to you is “Wait”. The hand goes up, the focus remains unchanged and the expectation mirrors that of a society that puts immediacy in second place. And so we take second place to the text message or the email or the simple stall. We wait. It had better be worth waiting for.
- Linda Muller