Impatience--and Learning to Handle it

Children are helplessly in the hands of their parents for the first several years of their lives, and often the "lessons" picked up from parents become stitched to the soul. One "lesson" I picked up early, and that really was quite a debilitating one for many years, was that you were supposed to be impatient with yourself and other people. Why? Because from my earliest memories I recall my father (and then my older brother) always being lividly angry with me for not "catching on" immediately to what they were trying to tell me. Often my father never really gave me a "chance," I felt. He would just explode when he saw me doing something that was other than the way he would do it, and he proceed to berate me with words emphasizing my stupidity or hopelessness. Rarely, if ever, did my inability encourage him to teach me. When he tried real hard, such as when he worked with me on a couple of Cub Scouts merit badges, he actually could teach me a few things--about hammering, sawing, etc. But soon his anger got the better of him, or his disgust with me won out, and we really couldn't work with one another.

It took me years, and I still am trying fully to distance myself from this, to realize that their impatience was more a reflection on them than on me. DH Lawrence has an interesting episode in Sons and Lovers where he says the same thing. Oldest son William Morel is a tutor, but he loses his temper almost immediately at his pupil. He calls him a "doddering blockhead" or "great booby..thundering idiot." His mother, however, intervenes and says:

"Wiliam! William...Be ashamed of yourself! I wonder anyone puts up with you.--Take no notice of him Robert, it's his own impatience that's the matter, not you. You're quick enough" (p. 71, 1992 Cambridge edition).

Despite being berated by my father and, to a lesser extent, by my older brother (he just picked it up from my dad, I am sure), I never thought of myself as "blockheadish" or "stupid." Indeed, I felt from the earliest age that I had something so special to offer to the world that someday the world would hasten to my doorstep to discover it. I wasn't sure at that time what that special thing was, even though I have a better idea now in what it consists.

Impatience Growing Up

Impatience was thereby inbred in me. Because I didn't catch on as quickly as my father would have liked me to in various areas, I systematically gave them up as areas of interest. Perhaps that is the worst "result" of this kind of thinking; I decided that I wouldn't work with my hands; I decided I wouldn't be curious about creativity in the manual arts. Though I remained under my dad's influence into early college years (majoring in math, as was the Long family tradition), I quickly broke from him when religion became central to my life, and that was where I would rest my hat for nearly 25 years.

Unbeknownst to myself, however, I was adopting the same approach to life. I became impatient with others, but especially with myself. Unless I could do or understand something instantly, I gave it up. Two examples are very clear in my mind. One weekend evening during graduate school I was hanging around Back Bay Boston with my wife at the time and some friends. We decided to go into "Paperback Booksmith," a great bookstore on Boylston St. I looked at some of the 1/2 price books, and one of them was on great thinkers in the Western tradition. It was about 300 pages in length, and two pages with a picture or two were devoted to each thinker. I recall scooping up the book, taking it home and trying to 'cram' Western intellectual history into my reading in the next four days. I thought to myself that if I couldn't "do" Hobbes, for example, in ten minutes, then I would just not look at him at all. I think I got through graduate school so easily because I had memorized so much of the Bible and biblical scholarship that it was "second nature" to me...

A second example happened about 15 years ago. I wanted to "get back" my Latin, which I had taken in HS and used sporadically in graduate school and beyond. So, I bought a number of graded text-books, which would take me from first through fourth year of Latin. I began to race through the books, reading far too much at a time, and then "burned myself out" when I had to face other responsibilities in my life. So, I gave it up...

Learning: My Way

My approach to learning (and to people--which I won't show here) was thus to be led by impatience. If something couldn't be done right away, I abandoned it. But now, I think I have changed, and the major way I have changed is to realize that I will do the things I want to do, and I will take the time I need to do those things well. But it is crucially important for me to define an "approach" to things that "works" for me. I am convinced that such an approach will also "work" for the institutions/people with whom I have to do, but they need to give me lots of time to develop that approach. I recognized that my "impatience" was undermining my "unique" approach to things, whether it is to learning, to putting knowledge "out there" on this site, or to helping groups of people define what they want to do.

So, now I work patiently and slowly. I learn the words "one by one" rather than mastering all kinds of long spelling lists. I learn my languages a little at a time, trying to develop firm knowledge of the language at each step of the way. I learn my history "deep," realizing that history unfolds like our lives unfold: one day at a time. Now, if there is any virtue I want to cultivate and think I have cultivated, it is patience. And, the reason: because I need to have an extreme amount of patience with myself if I am to flourish in life. Thus, I suppose that I am grateful, at a long distance, for the impatience of those in my family towards me. It so riveted me on the subject that I eventually came up with "my answer" for impatience. It is to let myself learn and teach the world at a pace that works for me. When I do this, I am most happy and so are those around me...

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