Patients with patience

Actually, impatience is one of my greater vices. If I want something to happen, I want it at once.
And now I am forced to wait for my hair to grow back in. While my hair is, fortunately, growing relatively fast, relative in that case still means at least a month before I can have anything like a presentable hairdo again. And there´s no way I can accelerate that.
So, all I can do is hurry up and wait.
Which is a great metaphor for a lot of things in life that take their time to grow and ripen.
We´d never think of berating an apple for not being ripe the day after the tree first bloomed, or of being angry at the sun for not rising faster.
Why, then, are we so impatient when it comes to our own projects?
Part of it is perhaps due to the general disconnect between our technorati city dweller lives and nature. How many of us do still have the experience of something growing instead of buying it fully grown? Even the flowers and herbs I put on my balcony were raised from their seeds elsewhere and by someone else.
The other part is connected with the notion that one should be and have, in everything, the fastest. Whether it is computers or cell phones, cars or PDAs, we act as if we had to withdraw the time they take to work from an account somewhere, which we can fill by "saving" time.
That term, "time-saving devices", is actually about the biggest hoax around, because you cannot save time.It runs away from you mercilessly, one minute at a time, and the "saved" time will be gone tomorrow just like the not-saved time. The only thing we buy with those devices is a chance to cram that time full with even more activities.
And while we are all given the same 24 hours every day, we act as if we had simultaneously been given an assignment of putting as much activity as possible into these hours.
Non-pleasurable activity, aka work, to be exact.
Under that premise, having to wait for something is approaching an insult.
So, we keep running faster in our respective hamster wheels- until we collapse.
As patients in a hospital, we then have to re-learn patience.
Of course, we could also get off the wheel before we collapse. We could admit to ourselves that having and doing everything is impossible for us mere humans, and that some things have to be done linearly, which means, yes, they take their time.
Perhaps we should take our time back, too, and find out what it feels like to have patience before we´re forced to.




Julia