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Patience: Letting Time Do Its Thing
A few months ago, I wrote about the Four Stages of Competence. I’m now in the throes of the Conscious Incompetence stage in my new job, and I’m continuing to apply insights and perspective from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals by Oliver Burkeman to work through my own situation. There is a lot that I don’t know, but I can only absorb and retain so much each day, so it’s a painfully slow process.
A few months ago, I wrote about the Four Stages of Competence. I’m now in the throes of the Conscious Incompetence stage in my new job, and I’m continuing to apply insights and perspective from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals by Oliver Burkeman to work through my own situation. There is a lot that I don’t know, but I can only absorb and retain so much each day, so it’s a painfully slow process. Last week, I talked about focus and letting go of distractions. Today’s theme is patience and acknowledging that, despite our best efforts, we can’t actually take control of time and bend it to our will. No matter how clever we are and how hard we work, some things just take their own time and can’t be rushed.
This can be tough to accept in our modern, capitalist society because we are conditioned to be impatient and want everything right now. Technological advances help us to do things more easily and quickly, but they can also give us the false sense that we are closer to being able to control our time, raising our expectations for how fast we should be able to get things done. Take microwave ovens for instance - they make it possible to cook foods that may have previously required hours to cook within a few short minutes. But then we stand impatiently in front of the microwave watching the countdown of seconds, and we might even decide to intervene before the beep, ending the cycle a few seconds early because it seems unbearable to wait any longer. Sound familiar?
We’ve adopted a sense of urgency that bears a resemblance to addiction. We look for ways to numb unpleasant feelings–like the discomfort we feel when there’s a lull in the constant fast pace and busyness–by trying to do even more. Then we get anxious and can’t ever achieve peace of mind. The only way to break out of this cycle is to surrender to reality and face the truth that we can’t dictate how quickly things go. Some things just can’t be rushed. Take reading a book, for example–unless you’re an unusually proficient speed reader, if you go too fast, you won’t be able to make sense of what you’re reading, and there is no meaning to it, and then you’re just wasting time.
This is where patience comes in: resisting the urge to hurry, doing one thing at a time, and making it count. When we stop trying to escape the discomfort we feel when we are present, the discomfort eventually becomes less intense and we are able to enjoy the actual experience. Resisting the usual tendency to race towards resolution means we are permitting the necessary time for reality to unfold at its own pace.
Burkeman offers three principles of patience:
Develop a taste for having problems - Instead of succumbing to the belief that we should not have problems, we can accept our problems as the things that we need to take care of and that give meaning and purpose to life. If we shift our focus from trying to get rid of all our problems to taking the time needed for each problem, we are experiencing what life is all about.
Embrace radical incrementalism - Spend smaller amounts of time on a task, but make it part of a regular routine, and in the long run you will end up producing more. Rushing to finish work as quickly as possible can have the unintended effect of hindering progress when we try to force time to conform to our will. This is especially true when there is a creative process involved - trying to hasten it will likely result in frustration. But when we stop what we’re doing after an allotted time, even if we feel we could do more, we’re building patience and the endurance to return to a project over and over again, making our productivity sustainable over a longer time.
Originality lives on the far side of unoriginality - Sometimes in our pursuit of the path less taken, we miss out on experiencing the richness and depth of going through all the stages and accomplishments of a well-worn path. Instead, focus on sticking with the part of the journey you’re in and truly engage where you are before seeking to switch to something else just because it’s different and exciting.
So much of this speaks to me. I admit to being a variety junkie and I love to try new things, but if I reflect on the aspects of my life where I have meaning and satisfaction, they are the ones that have been consistent over a long period of time. Relationships with family and friends get richer over years. I see progress in my yoga practice and strength training workouts when I repeat the same poses or reps regularly for weeks or even months; I can’t force myself to be more flexible and strong by spending hours in one sitting on it. And I also can’t keep changing things up and expect to see progress. The creativity and progress involved in developing a discipline take time and persistence to develop.
I don’t know how long it will take to emerge from my current discomfort, but I know I have to let it be and stay the course. I’m taking it one day at a time. Every once in a while there will be a glimpse of progress, a small sense of accomplishment, to give me hope. And I’ll keep showing up.