Tag: patience

Learning to Wait

The calendar looked like a warped tic-tac-toe board.

A series of X’s covered various date boxes, with the marks accelerating toward one date that was circled.

My sister was relying on this system as she waited for our parents to return.

They were across the ocean, enjoying a European vacation. Our grandparents were looking after us in their stead.

I didn’t mind this arrangement. But my sister did.

She was maybe 4 or 5 years old. She couldn’t fathom why our parents would abandon us like this. And she wanted the whole episode to end, immediately.

So, after enduring a night of my sister’s hysterics, my grandmother suggested the calendar technique. It wouldn’t make our parents come home faster. But it would help make their impending return more tangible.

The activity transformed my sister. A new sense of determination overtook her. Despair gave way to excitement, which built with each passing day.

Learning to wait was paying dividends.

Patience is a virtue.

You’ve likely heard that proverb a time or three. And for good reason.

Waiting, you see, is the natural order of things. Plants take time to blossom. Structures take time to complete. And opportunities take time to emerge.

And yet, we’re not wired to wait. From our earliest days, we demand instant gratification. A bottle. A blanket. A toy.

To paraphrase Queen, we want it all and we want it now.

This central tension requires a metamorphosis. To reap the fruits of the world around us, we must learn to live by its rules. And that requires a crash course in patience.

My grandmother taught that course to my sister with that calendar exercise. And I went through similar crucibles as I learned to wait.

These lessons were annoying, frustrating, and bewildering at the time. But looking back now, I’m grateful for them.

For much of my life has developed gradually. Professional opportunities have often been slow to emerge. Social connections have ebbed and flowed. Earning power has arrived relatively late to the party.

If I hadn’t learned patience, I wouldn’t have achieved much. I’d have thrown in the towel years ago — resigning myself to a future of bitterness and diminished potential.

Patience was one of the greatest gifts of my childhood.

But I wonder if I’m among its final recipients.

My middle school years were a whirlwind.

I was attending a new school — one which I was commuting to on my own. To cut down on the risk, my parents bought me a cell phone.

Back home, my parents had added cable TV, a PlayStation 2, and a DSL internet line. Instead of spending my evenings ensconced in boredom, I could now watch a show, play a video game, or browse the web.

Instant gratification had been dropped into my midst like supplies from a rescue helicopter. Life had fundamentally changed.

But not entirely.

You see, much of this technology was primitive by modern standards. Smartphones and streaming were still years away. And the options contained in these digital devices were far from limitless.

Plus, I’d already become well-versed in the virtue of patience. So, I tended to treat instant gratification more like snack than a full meal.

The landscape is far different for kids today.

By the time they get to middle school, many have been playing with smartphones and tablets for years. They’ve streamed bottomless catalogs of shows on big screen TVs. They’ve played hosts of video games online, facing off against peers hundreds of miles away.

This setup provides ample opportunities for the newest generations. Opportunities my younger self could have never dreamed of.

And yet, it brings up some disconcerting questions.

It’s safe to say that today’s children won’t need resort to cross off dates on their calendars or counting the tiles on the kitchen backsplash. There are more dynamic entertainment options at their disposal.

But how will these generations learn how to practice patience? That lesson no longer seems to be required in the era of instant gratification. And I worry about what that means down the line.

On a June night in Florida, a group of hockey players took turns skating around an ice rink in a sports arena.

The players had just won the Stanley Cup. And each was taking a victory lap with the most prestigious trophy in sports – cheered on by thousands of delirious fans.

Standing among the players on the ice was a middle-aged man in a suit. He was the team’s coach. A hard-charging hockey lifer who had never won the big one before.

As a TV reporter interviewed the coach, one of the players skated up to the coach with the Stanley Cup. He abruptly paused the interview and hoisted the trophy high above his head, letting out a roar.

It was fitting.

Paul Maurice had coached 26 seasons in the National Hockey League. He had spent time behind the bench for four different franchises, winning 900 games in the process.

But he’d never reached the pinnacle of his profession before.

He’d come close at times. Twice, he’d watched an opposing team hoist the cup at his team’s expense. But he’d also been fired twice and forced to resign once.

It had been a long road to glory. In the face of so much heartbreak and heartache, Maurice needed to practice patience. To learn to wait for his opportunity, and to capture it when it arrived.

That opportunity came at the end of his second season coaching the Florida Panthers. Patience paid off in a moment of instant gratification.

It sounds ironic. But it’s par for the course.

You see, hockey coaching jobs have become a revolving door in recent years. Few bench bosses last more than a few seasons with any team. Instead, experienced coaches move around the league in an elaborate game of musical chairs.

As I write this, only three coaches across the league have been in their posts for four seasons. Yet at least nine have track records comparable to Maurice’s.

It seems that team executives have impulse-itis. They crave instant gratification and accept nothing less. Even though the absurdity of that quest is self-evident.

This disconnect is what awaits our entire society if we don’t learn to wait. People will jump ship from their responsibilities at the first moment of difficulty. Those offering opportunities will cut bait at the first sign of underperformance.

There will be no runway for us to evolve, to grow, to let things develop. Life will be a series of hollow moments in time, with precious few of them fulfilling.

This is not a path worth following. So, let’s re-blaze an old one.

Let’s put boundaries around the instant gratification in our midst. Let’s re-introduce mid and long-term goals back to our lives. And let’s evangelize patience as a strength, not a weakness.

Going back to the future like this will surely have its challenges. But it will unlock untold opportunities for all of us to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

And that’s an outcome worth waiting for.

Patience, Grasshopper

We ventured out onto the pier. My grandfather and I.

Suddenly, we stopped and turned toward the water.

A large bridge towered over us. That structure had long ago replaced this one, ferrying traffic over the intercoastal.

As I gazed upwards in wonder, my grandfather took some bait out of a box. He fixed some to the hook on the end of his fishing rod. Then he did the same with my fishing rod.

We cast our lines into the water. And as we watched the bait disappear below the surface, I asked one question.

What now?

My grandfather smiled.

Now, we wait, he said.

It was quiet on the pier. And boredom quickly started to wash over me.

But then, I felt a tug on my line.

I reeled it in with the ferocity of a caged tiger. Only to find the bait gone – and seaweed stuck to the hook in its place.

I had caught nothing.

My grandfather helped me rebait the hook. I cast my line once again and stared at the water.

How long is this going to take? I openly mused.

He glanced over to me.

It depends on the fish, he replied. It could be minutes, or hours. Patience. Patience is key.

These were not the words an 8-year-old wanted to hear. And I protested vehemently.

So, we reeled in our lines and went home empty-handed.

Fishing was a flop.

Cult classic.

These words are overused today. But in a less hyperbolic era, they perfectly defined the TV series Kung Fu.

Back in the 1970s, shows like M*A*S*H, Happy Days, and The Brady Bunch permeated American culture. Kung Fu never gained the level of eponymy that those shows did. But it’s maintained critical acclaim through the decades.

The series covered the travails of Caine, a Shaolin monk with a deft proficiency in martial arts. As he drifts across the American frontier, Caine’s calm demeanor seem as out of place as his fighting skills.

A series of flashbacks help audiences fill in the gaps. They show Caine’s origins as an orphan in a Chinese monastery.

A blind master named Po oversees much of Caine’s training. And whenever Caine acts restlessly, Po turns to some variation of a familiar phrase.

Patience, young grasshopper.

Those words come to define Caine’s life. And that phrase has come to define the series.

This is all more than a bit ironic.

You see, for all its Asian tendencies, Kung Fu was an American show. It catered to an audience that stood for the Star Spangled Banner.

Americans have held many defining traits over the generations. But patience has not been one of them.

Just look at our history.

Impatience was behind our decision to declare independence in the wake of British tax hikes. It’s what spurred us to rapidly expand our borders westward to the Pacific Ocean. It’s what fueled us to unleash technological innovations that changed the world.

So, what led us to reverse course while viewing Kung Fu? What caused us to embrace a phrase we fail to embody?

Necessity. And aspiration.

Not long ago, I was looking for tickets to a major sporting event.

The tickets never went on sale to the general public. So, I was forced to scour the resale market.

Going the resale route is like taking a plunge into a frigid lake. Sellers can set their own prices based on demand. And the sticker shock often stings at first.

This was the case when I searched a prominent resale database. Ticket prices were not only outside my budget, but also outside the realm of reason.

But the event was a little more than a month away. I’d already committed to attending, and I’d gotten time off from work to do so. I needed these tickets.

What was I to do?

I stared at my computer screen, my mouse cursor hovering over the Buy button.

I was ready to bite the bullet. I was prepared to overpay just to get in the gate.

But then, I heard a voice in my head.

Patience, grasshopper.

There was no harm in waiting. Prices likely wouldn’t get much worse until the eve of the event. And there remained a chance that they’d go down as sellers got desperate to unload their inventory.

I heeded the voice of reason. And I closed out of the website.

A couple weeks later, I checked the website again. Across town, another pro team was playing for a league championship. All the attention was on them at the moment, and the resale prices for my event had dropped precipitously.

I quickly clicked Buy. Patience had paid off.

I’d come a long way from the fishing debacle to find the ways of Caine.

But that road wasn’t easy.

What are we gonna do now?

If I were to tally up my most common phrases of childhood, that one would be near the top of the list.

I demanded a planned activity at all waking hours, much to my parents’ chagrin.

Learn to entertain yourself, they’d grumble.

This proved to be a challenge.

Books were a dud, as I kept losing my place in the text. Toys were exciting until they weren’t. We only had access to three TV channels; smartphones and streaming were still decades away.

And so, my impatience festered.

This is one of the reasons I spent so much time with my grandparents growing up. My grandfather was already retired when I was born, and my grandmother retired when I was in elementary school. They had plenty of time to embark on adventures with me, and to keep me entertained.

Some of these treks didn’t go as intended. The fishing trip was one of those.

Yet, most others went swimmingly. At least that’s what I felt at the time.

But now, I wonder if I had it all wrong.

There’s a case to be made that my grandparents’ endless activities only fueled my impatience. That it deferred the concept of delayed gratification. And that made me ever more restless in the process.

Indeed, I reached adulthood nothing less than impulsive. I ran up my credit card balance in college, without much consideration as to how I’d pay it off. And when I had to wait six weeks after graduation for a job offer, I was completely despondent.

I had no concept of the value of waiting. Of letting the dust settle and the picture come into focus.

It took years to gain that clarity. But once I finally embraced it, I felt like a changed man. A better man.

I’m better equipped now to avoid overpaying for a sports event. Or making a poor career decision. Or ditching an exercise plan prematurely.

I’m better able to embrace the process and reap the results.

Patience, you see, is a weapon. It allows us to read situations fully before acting. It cuts out rash actions. It keeps us in control.

Patience is the road not taken. Yet, it represents the best path forward.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, of course. There are plenty of times where waiting it out can be quite costly.

But on the balance, we could use more patience than we currently exhibit.

We could stand to be more like Caine. We could be well-served fending off our impulses. We could thrive when embracing a deliberate pace.

There is nothing in the way of this future. Nothing but ourselves.

Patience is a virtue. Let’s make it our own.