According to Edmund Burke, "Patience will achieve more than force. It's been famously said that "All good things come to he who waits." They say, "Patience is a virtue." "Patience is the key to contentment," they say. And they might very well be right.
In the more ordinary sense (the sense of waiting without demanding that someone "hurry up, dammit!"), I guess I'm fairly patient. But because I am waiting for something, I am not exercising the kind of patience that 'achieves more than force,' or 'brings all good things,' or 'is the key to contentment.' My problem is the expectation that some specific thing(s) will come to me if I wait.
But I think patience is more than waiting. Patience is waiting without expectation; patience is waiting without waiting for anything.
A lot of things are worth waiting for. But there's more than one kind of waiting, and the kind where you passively sit, expecting what you desire to magically appear, is useless. When you engage in that kind of waiting, you're expecting the world to give you what you want because you "deserve" it, or because "it's only fair," or maybe because you bought into the "All good things come to he who waits" propaganda. And the world just doesn't work that way.
Vultures are famous for their waiting... but the cartoon above, one of many renderings of the same idea, suggest that it's possible to have too much of even so good a thing as patience.
And while there are many quotes, proverbs, and aphorisms extolling the virtues of patience, there are some that take a contrary position:
"Patience is good only when it is the shortest way to a good end; otherwise. impatience is better."Patience my ass...
"Patience under old injuries invites new ones."
"He preacheth patience that never knew pain." H. G. Bohn
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