Praise and virtue of patience, life is not a race

Praise and virtue of patience, we could go on for a long time in the list of challenges that patience must go through in order to succeed, to be useful and not to be wasted. There is a part of us that is always active and super active in the era of technological presentism.

Who would like to break any relationship between time and the naturalness of life. Up to overcoming patience to grasp what we want as soon as possible, now and immediately.

As if life were a sequence of unrepeatable opportunities not to be missed. And not instead a path whose evolution is precisely made up of a weaving, sometimes slow, sometimes faster. In an alternation of equal and opposite thrusts, in which patience is the strength of the weak and impatience the weakness of the strong as Kant wrote.

Importance and praise of patience

It takes a lot of patience every day to reach a goal. so as not to get carried away in some brawl with a neighbor, a workmate, a friend who betrays us. But having patience pays off, and helps to live better. Even if we no longer recognize any value to this virtue, which is also essential in human relationships. Indeed, we consider it a waste of time and an antiquity of behaviors that we cannot afford.

We live in the age of high speed, of everything and now, of disposable. Our watches are always synchronized with upcoming deadlines, with commitments to be respected, with programs to be completed. But patience requires an expansion of the present, an extension of it, a pause in the incessant becoming. We need to take a break to be patient.

In praise of patience, a virtue to be recovered

Yet it is precisely patience, distant from the anxiety of presentism, that allows us to wait for the right moment. The maturation of things and not their evaporation, even before having brought them into focus. A woman’s courtship is patient, and cannot be played out in the moment of an exchange of text messages or messages on social media. Waiting for the recognition of one’s value at work is patient.

And it is patience, sometimes tiring and even frustrating, the search for what unites us compared to what divides us. Patience is what in man most resembles the procedure that nature uses in his creations, writes Honoré de Balzac in his book The Lost Illusions.

Think of the bees, their patient how essential community work. In a single day, a single beehive visits 225 thousand flowers, with a journey equal to four times the tour of the planet. And all the activity of bees, the wonderful chain of roles and functions, is declined under the banner of patience.

The eclipse of patience

It is also due to the misinterpretation of its function. It is often confused with inertia, with the downward compromise. Or worse, it is cataloged as a defeat, a passive surrender in the face of the inevitability of the facts.

On the contrary, impatience, perhaps accompanied by anger, becomes a sign of strength, resolve and determination of character. A real misunderstanding, and a reversal of paradigms. With deadly effects, for example, in relations with our neighbors.

We have become a people of citizens who unleash an apartment building brawl every half hour, moved and inspired by that very loss of patience that makes us feel strong, where instead we have all become more vulnerable.