The Importance of Being Patient

One of the most valuable lessons I ever learned from my father was patience. Fishing was (and is) something that required patience, and fishing is something we did a lot of. Hunting, likewise, required patience, including sitting for hours at a time in a tree stand in temperatures around zero.

Patience - waiting - is also essential in attaining goals. If accumulating wealth is one's goal, one has to learn how to defer actions, and how to give up immediate gratification to achieve longer-term goals.

This is why it's interesting to see a piece on waiting from The Free Press' Christine Rosen:

Waiting isn’t what it used to be. These days, we expect to be able to avoid the dullness of it—and not just when we are spending a day at a theme park. Nearly every moment of interstitial time can be filled with entertainment or communication. We turn to our smartphones to check email, text a friend, or play Candy Crush. It feels good to remove oneself mentally from the reality of waiting; our new and boundless capacity to escape tedium can feel like a micro-revolution. But the problem with revolutions is that they sometimes devour their children.
If the experience of waiting has changed—does that mean we have, too?

Yes, I think it does. I can't imagine many young people today - including my grandchildren if we're being honest - sitting in a deer stand 10 feet up a tree for an entire morning without checking their cell phones to read emails or play a game. In this, I think Christine Rosen is correct. There are so many distractions, so many avenues to go down, that one doesn't have to wait, patient and focused, on one particular goal.

It's not all just about variety, though; it's also about speed, the enemy of patience:

The novelist Milan Kundera once described speed as “the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed upon man,” and he is correct about its pleasures. Speed is often an improvement, a boon that eliminates the bane of “wasted time.” But what he, and we, might not have predicted is how quickly speed raises our expectations, how impatient we get if everything happens quickly.

And that may well be a problem for today's youth.

Many of us older folks got to where we are - living comfortably with very little debt and a fair amount of savings to fall back on - by delaying gratification. We, in many cases, delayed the short-term to achieve the long-term. But will today's youths, who have been raised in a culture of immediacy, be able to go through life in this way? Will they carefully, patiently plan? Will they wait? Will they defer the immediate?

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I guess that remains to be seen, but Christine Rosen is right to be concerned. Oh, many of today's youths will learn this lesson, but how many won't - that is the question.

Robert Heinlein, one of my major literary heroes, in his signature work "Stranger in a Strange Land," described how the Martian race he created for the story had a highly refined sense of timing in all their affairs; timing was accomplished by waiting, and was summarized by the saying "Waiting always fills." It's an interesting outlook. It's also another lesson, albeit using fictional people, in patience.

If you have kids or grandkids, one of the best things you can do for them is to make them leave their phones at home - and take them fishing. Fishing is all about waiting - and waiting always fills. It's a lesson that will serve them well later in life.