On (Im)patience

Many of us see impatience as a personal flaw, but in the age immediacy how we be anything else?

When asked the question at job interviews: “what is you main weakness?”, I invariably answer that I lack patience. This allows me to spin what is essentially a trick question. To reflect on a fairly ubiquitous trait and turn it into a desirable asset in the market of human productivity. I get things done. I hit my deadlines. Impatience retooled as drive and dedication.

But it's also true, I lack patience. 

Impatience haunts my self-conception, it’s the gremlin that compromises areas of life I’d like to think I’m good at. In the last year, I’ve taken on a new work role where I am managing people more than ever before. Even in a university, supposedly a site of higher learning and maybe even critical thought, having one of those unenviable titles indicative of modern bureaucracy: “line-manager”, it’s hard not to feel like one enacts impatience as a kind of performative officiousness. With around twenty five staff on the degree, the job is essentially a process of self-managing the anxiety of incompleteness as it is leading, guiding, collaborating, placating and encouraging others.

I wonder if there is something in my mind-body connection, some cognitive blueprint - get it done as quickly as possible - on which my subjectivity runs. Getting dressed brushing my teeth, eating food. Urgent completion of such banal, day-to-day functions seems to be my psychological default. Assessing one’s own personality objectively, is fruitless at the best of times. But to indulge for a moment, I think this impatience is derived, somewhat paradoxically, from a basic laziness. I operate on the flawed logic that getting something done quickly means I can go back to sitting on the sofa. This, naturally, can have a knock on effect on the quality of ones work (in the general sense of the word). Inculcated in hastiness is also the implication of thoughtlessness and, in turn, a questioning of ones character and temperament.

“Patience is a virtue” has an uncertain provenance. Yet it’s a truism suffused into language and culture, to the point of being beyond contest. After some expeditious internet searching, I found it is variously defined as a Chinese proverb, described as one of the seven heavenly virtue’s in the 5th century Poem Psychomachia, and attributed to another poem, Piers Plowman, written in 136O by English poet William Langland.

It’s a maxim that has been adopted/bastardised by a litany of historical and contemporary luminaries and reprobates. Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales writes:

Patience is a conquering virtue. The learned say that, if it not desert you, It vanquishes what force can never reach; Why answer back at every angry speech? No, learn forbearance or, I'll tell you what, You will be taught it, whether you will or not.

Combining wisdom with tolerance, the insinuation here is that patience is a trait requiring self-reflection and restraint, particularly useful in the face of another’s ire. “Bite your tongue” and “turn the other cheek” seem like variations of the same principle. There is also something paternal about this. Another phrase - “you have the patience of saint” - calls to mind the unruly child for which reasoning, persuading, disciplining or even bribing has no impact.

Quoting patience as a method of regaling one’s own self-awareness or moral character even can leak into self-regard, even condescension. At the reprobate end of the spectrum, the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg has co-opted it as part of his faux-religious self-absorption. Elon Musk, whose disruptor reputation is built on corporate tyranny of the now, is quoted as saying patience is something he’s working on!?!

It’s so obvious as to be vapid, to reference the attention annihilation of digital culture as the reason for a collective form of social impatience. Coming to terms with the consequences of being plugged into a hyper-mediated existence, seems both utterly necessary and disturbingly futile. Technological revolution is in perpetual motion.(There is wealth of research and writing in this area, here is a statistically informed piece from the Pew research centre) I don’t want to get into those weeds on that here. One claim I will venture is that human psychology has been rewired to the point that boredom, in the “I’ve nothing to do mum” sense, has become a thing of the past. No, not obsolete, nor redundant, but in fact, the enemy of consumption.

But returning my own travails, impatience is the antagonist of focus and precision. I view it as the axiomatic handicap to my basic competency as a writer and academic. Just getting things done to a passable standard was always my approach to school work. But going back to university as a mature student, I realised just how much my writing was compromised by poor spelling, punctuation, grammar and even basic sentence structure. It wasn’t dyslexic. My writing was generally poor, burdened by clunking typos and strange recurring tics. I would write “with” instead of “which” for some reason, “there” and “their” were randomly interchangeable. I don’t even want to go into the disaster zone of plurals and possessives.

There were a host of variables I could point to in mitigation: I’d been out of education for ten years, I lacked enthusiasm for reading and writing as a child, the standard of school teaching I experienced may not have been great, and the expectation of concentration in the regimented school structure clearly doesn’t suit a large proportion of learners. Yet, that essential ability just to “be” - in time without feeling time - may be the key compromising syndrome to both my writing and reading.

Progressing through BA and Masters degrees, I figured out improvements, passing these courses well enough. Rereading my texts out loud was a useful strategy, but soliciting partners, friends and my mother to proofread, was a necessary humiliation. Moving into a PhD presented a higher level of written expression, and a deeper anxiety. I had a supervisor who was head of the English department. He was extremely helpful and thorough yet, at times, I could sense his exasperation with quality of my writing. I remember one particularly devastating meeting. His method from the outset was to mark up the mistakes in my written drafts, alongside commenting on the research and arguments. One particular day, this has gotten to the point of no return. I’m paraphrasing but he ruthlessly admonished me for, “writing at a level that wouldn’t pass at undergrad first year level”, and that he was “no longer going to be my proof-reader”, and the denouement, something along the lines of “I’m not sure you are capable of attaining a PhD”.

This hit hard. I spent the next few hours wandering around the campus, figuring out whether I actually did have the “intelligence” to write a PhD. I certainly took this all on myself. There was no looking for caveats or mitigation regarding any educational disadvantages. I can’t rewrite the past (without spelling mistakes obviously). So the only answer was to look at how I dedicated myself to the project, and particularly my writing. Care, attention and time spent being thorough, were elements that I could control. One thing I did have in abundance was bloody-mindedness. “Fuck you, I can do this”, I thought (that was self directed rather than to my supervisor).

This origin story points to the beginning of the reconstitution of my personality. That sounds rather over the top, I grant you. To cut a long story short I completed my PhD using a monk like disciplinary practice. It took it’s toll mentally (that’s another blog). But my laziness was purged for good. I not longer feel embarrassed to ask for help, specifically with proofreading. And I learned to take on feedback less defensively. But this required the rejection of that romantic mythos, attributed in my mind to the likes of Christopher Hitchens, that proper writers can drink a couple of bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and then produce 1000 words of publishable prose without so much as a comma out of place.

Probably the single most difficult and ongoing struggle though, is to be able to sit in the perpetual discomfort of impatience, a practice I’ve have to ceaselessly cultivate. Such a mindset is perhaps most imperative in the context of relationships. Collaboration, with a romantic partner or project partner of some kind requires, simultaneously, managing the abiding fear of being an overzealous imposer of ones own timeframe, and the need to effect some kind of process or action. I think what I end up doing is deliberatively not trying to impose any negative reaction to being made to wait, whether that becomes consequential or not. I take the anxiety inwards: it’s me and my unreasonable expectations (if someone is not doing something). This doesn’t preclude the monster of resentment stirring in the back of ones head. Particularly if you have consistent patience tester in your life. I’ve had a few.

Of course, patience in today’s insistent world has to be mindfully orchestrated. With all the cognitive bombardment it seems incredibly difficult to manifest space in the allotment of the mind. The cult of mindfulness, with it’s accompanying myriad technological and social accoutrements, is the ready solution to impatience capitalism. Add to that the rise of the anti-immediacy movement, not prefixed by the word patient, but the more impertinent sounding “slow”. Slow cooking, slow fashion, slow cinema, slow fashion, generally slow living. I don’t know. Even though I have sympathy for the intention, “slow” possesses a whiff of the pejorative. But then would attaching “patient”, “mindful” or “deliberative” to any activity just reek of sanctimony? Labelling is always a minefield.

In the Book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortal, self-confessed productivity geek Oliver Burkeman addresses the subject of patience by regaling the story of a professor of Art at Harvard University, Jennifer Roberts. She sets her new students a simple task: they have to select a painting or a sculpture in a gallery and look at it for 3 hours straight. The motivation for this, as Burkeman discusses on the The Drive Podcast (1:29:00), is Roberts’ sense that the lives of these young people are so geared towards speed that: “it was her job, she felt, to disrupt the tempo of what they were doing, to slow them down…She knows it’s an outrageous length of time, That’s the point”.

I tried this myself, the other day (Thursday 10th of August). It was the last day of my vacation and I felt it would be the last time for a while I might be able to truly detach for that long. My confession is that I “only” reached 1 hour and 27 minutes. I started later than I wanted to and, with another appointment looming and the desperate need for the bathroom superseding the will to concentrate, I took my leave. But I did observe, diligently Piet Mondrian’s Lighthouse at Westkapelle, for the duration, ignoring all the other work in the Hilma Af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life exhibition.

Interestingly, I didn’t find this as uncomfortable a process as Burkeman describes. Maybe the extra 90 minutes would have exacerbated the sense that this is an inordinate amount of time to focus on a single, static work of art. I did feel that over time the painting revealed more to me, as I explored not only form and colour, but texture, and even narrative. After about twenty minutes (I think) it became obvious how the representational was collapsing into the abstract in unique ways. The columns of the lighthouse walls meld into the yellow “fence” at the front; depending how one looks the edifice can shift from 2 dimensional to 3 dimensional.

But there were other outcomes that were environmental. One of those security/museum guides, seemed to be getting increasingly antsy at how long I was staying in the same position. The more transitory viewers could be put into two camps: those that acknowledged that they would be standing in font of me (some even apologising), an those that didn’t (some ostentatiously blocking my view). A couple of people sat beside me. One, I thought, tried to engage in a competition as to how long they would we would sit there (I won, obviously).

I set a task similar to this as a teaching exercise in one of my film classes. However, instead of the three hours, I used a 7-minute sequence from Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Weekend. Not to disparage your average 21st century film student, but not all of them would comply if I asked them to go and watch an example of “Slow Cinema” - some three hour mindfuck from say Bela Tarr, or Tsai Ming-Liang. Also, I wanted to get the message across about the effect of “slowness” as a device in film. The Godard example is a well-known one shot in which the camera tracks a car attempting to make its way through a traffic jam. When discussing this with students many of then have said how difficult they find it to stay focused through the entire scenario. Yet others intimated that they picked up on both aesthetic and narrative registers imbued by the visual arrangement through time. Some even comment on going through stages of emotional response. A trajectory that might encompass: curiosity>confusion>boredom>exasperation>amusement>realisation>interpretation

Roberts’ pedagogic test must be a favourite among a certain type of writer as it also pops up in Joe Moran’s First I Write a Sentence. He reports the same outcome as Burkeman: when you slow down and look at something for an extended period of time, you start to notice on a deeper level. Moran, who teaches English, has his own version of the task.

Find a sentence you like and look at it for a distressingly long time, until you see past its sense into its shape…turn it’s shape into a dough-cutter for your own sentences, the arcs of anticipation and suspense, the balancing phrases, the wholesome little snap of the full stop.

I’m using Moran’s book in this fashion. As a syntactic self-help manuel for navigating the rocky terrain of my own writing process. But this is, implicitly, a call to patience as a kind of tool that can (should?) be deployed more generally. Maybe it’s trite to say it’s a hack, but programming oneself to a level of attention that is accepting of both time and a kind of concerted beingness, feels like something of a radical act.

I do question the idea that patience per se possesses some essential, transcendent virtuousness. And those who display or enact it as a disposition, are perspicuously endowed with a moral integrity. But it’s hard not to see it as, what? A bug? A glitch? A trait to be managed and worked on. Even now I’m defensive about it. At the moment of publishing this piece, I’m wracked with anxiety. How many typos are in this text, and how much you, dear reader, are judging me for it? But even typing that out, I’m at least sitting with the discomfort of it.

(No one else has proof-read this piece).

(I proofed again on February 24, 2024 and found at least 10 typos. Fuck!)