Impatience is a bad thing. When it’s a general impatience, directed at the nebulous World, it appears to be a more socially acceptable frustration, but a true, deep impatience with yourself is a sure sign that you’re slipping.
Impatience with yourself makes you do all sorts of stupid things to break the dead-lock. You take rash decisions and force progress, or at least what you think is progress, in the hope of pushing the cart that is your personal existence forward ever so slightly.
We’ve all been told the cart is going somewhere, that it has a destination and that the destination is awesome. Where and when that destination is imagined to be varies based on the individual’s beliefs. Some are waiting for the pinnacle of achievement to slowly fade in from the mist on the horizon, some are waiting to be swallowed by the approaching darkness at the end of the road, because beyond the darkness is salvation. To them this cart-ride is just one long shopping trip to make sure they are well equipped for the real journey. Some are just waiting for something to happen. Anything.
We wait, sometimes with patience but mostly with a healthy amount of loathing at the sky and the rocks that they would have us delay that ultimate, if elusive, gratification. And then there is the healthy loathing for ourselves, for not being able to push the cart faster. Impatience is a bad thing, and an impatience with yourself will almost certainly cause you to slip.
The fault lies not in the sky and the rocks, but in the silly creatures pushing the ragged cart down the narrow, difficult road, while doing the least fruitful thing they can, waiting. We wait for something we do not really know, we wait for something we couldn’t recognise, yet impatiently we wait. We ignore the path, and the sky, and the trees, the wild grasses dancing like the tide in the breeze, the solidity of the cart in our hands, the intoxicating scent of wet wood and Earth as they meet and part, the refreshing rain on our faces, the fascinating travellers we greet along the way, the bounty of fruit in our cart, the slow rhythmic music of the wheels skipping over the frequent pebbles in the mud.
All that we ignore, and we wait, for our salvation, for our victory, for our deliverance into better times, for our release, never once questioning the sense of the path we have taken, never once consciously choosing another cart to push, never once stopping to enjoy the stars. Instead we blindly push, and drink to forget the pains of walking blindly on uneven ground, and consume to satisfy an un-named craving, and sleep to forget our sorrowful punishments at the hands of the rocks and the sky, and dream. We dream of the sorrow and the suffering of days gone by, and the pleasure and joy that awaits us in some unfathomed future. Then we wake up, we placate the sky with some mutterings to make up for the curses we will hurl at it when the day gets hotter, we kick a few rocks in frustration, and in a half stupor of food and drink and dreams, we push the tottering cart and wait impatiently.
Samir
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Samir,
you´re absolutely right, I think impatience has ruled all of us humans many times, we forget about ourselves, just leting impatience rule, and of course we leave the way for other things to “help us”, the thing is, we have to live in communion to who we are, our times, spaces, and with patience, nothing good will come out from other.
You’re right, Magali. Too much faith is put in the fact that something or someone will come in to solve whatever it is that we want solved. Very few people take on that responsibility themselves, which is an unfortunate thing.
Hasn’t it been said “They also serve who only stand and wait”? And often they are also the ones who live life to the fullest.
I looked that line up. It would seem that line originally has a very specific context, which is a bit of an aside, but still interesting.
After going blind John Milton wrote a poem called On His Blindness, the last line of which was
He was talking about is new inability to be a physically contributing part of society. He was saying that even people can only stand and wait still have a part to play in the larger picture.
Your people who wait are obviously the people who stand back from the race of life and take time to absorb and reflect on what they experience and what they ought to do. It’s a noble decision, and one very few choose to take. Like Milton’s waiting people, the reflective ones have not only a part to play, but a crucial part, because they take on the point of view of a detached observer of the throngs of people rushing about, and the World around them. They see things and recognize patterns that the others can’t.
If not for this minority of observers and considered thinkers, human society would never change. The ones who wait and watch, pass on what they see to the crowds, and so we progress.