Patience

“He that can have patience can have what he will.” 

—Benjamin Franklin

I spent a good bit of today in the garden, weeding and transplanting seedlings and doing other mundane garden maintenance.  Although these tasks are simple, they require considerable care to avoid damaging delicate plants.  The payoff—flowers—won’t come for weeks or months, and the plants require care at every stage of their development.  And sometimes the payoff doesn’t come at all; there is too much rain or too little sun or the leaf fungus gets out of hand…or something.  But you have to take each step at the right time, never late but also never early, and remain confident that your efforts will produce results.  This is patience.

          Gardening requires patience.  But if you allow it to, it will inculcate patience in you.  As I pull weeds and snip dead blooms and such, I can feel myself slowing down mentally and physically.  My breathing deepens and slows, and my thoughts gradually turn away from the outside world and are circumscribed by a series of small patches of dirt.  And it is the doing of gardening that engages me, rather than the product.  I spend hours digging and weeding and pruning, but I spend very little time just looking at the flowers and “enjoying” what I have grown.  That is my wife’s job.

          Patience is commonly accounted a virtue by people who think about such things as character or ethics—preachers, philosophers, busybodies, and such.  One might even make a strong argument that it has an important role in the development of the other virtues.  What virtue (or the virtues, however you enumerate them) often requires of us, in practical terms, is that we put up with not getting something that we want right now, or perhaps ever.  Patience is practice at doing just this.  

          In the political realm, the virtue of patience can be invoked for good or ill, or not at all.  In contemporary US political culture, patience has very little presence.  This is evident in the quintessential American protest chant:

          What do we want!?!

          [Whatever it is we want!!!]

          When do we want it!?!

          Now!!!

 And it is evident in social phenomena as different as the success of Amazon and the culture of texting and and the frenetic news cycle and the demands to reopen the economy immediately.

          There is no doubt that patience is often counseled as a means of circumventing the demands of people who are being treated unjustly.  Like all virtues, it can become a vice by being misplaced.  But the problems the country and the world face today—racism, climate change, pandemics, wildly volatile and fragile economies—are going to require a different kind of patience.  To effectively address any of these and a host of other matters is likely gong to require some putting up with not getting what we want right now, or perhaps ever, by the most of us.

          The thing about this sort of patience—it requires that you begin.  You have to plant the seed before you can wait for the flower.  We have to be changing the unjust laws or addressing the environmental and medical issues or improving economic institutions.  Otherwise, there is no reason for anyone to be patient because we’re just goofing off.  And that pretty much captures our contemporary political culture.  We’re not very patient.  And we’re not doing much of anything to be patient about.