I probably spend too much time analyzing life: past events, future plans, decisions, relationships, moments in time. I suspect in terms of poetry or creative writing, that habit might serve me well, but in terms of… life? it might be a bit stymieing. I also spend too much time flip-flopping on concepts like duality. No sooner do I write a sentence like “I spend too much time on…” I reject the statement. There is no such thing as too much time or too little time, time just is. And no sooner do I write that, I reject that thought as a form of Hedonism or Nihilism or Hedonic Nihilism – a lame excuse for both action and inaction… a lack of personal accountability.
That is a cryptic beginning. Cryptic beginnings happen when I’m working with competing ideas and when I’m thinking about things that I really don’t know how to tackle – mostly because all of my new thinking isn’t terribly different from all of my old thinking – perhaps just different words arranged in longer sentences.
I recently read an article in Psychology Today called “Patience in Romantic Relationships.” As with a lot of the articles I read in Psychology Today, I found some nuggets of wisdom tucked in to a piece that seems a little too obvious and often misses the opportunity for a deeper exploration. It’s as if in an effort to make the content digestible, a lot of assumptions are made and blanket statements put forth. To be fair, I never read the book or books that are referenced – which is probably where the deeper discussion and nuance takes place. In this particular article, the author was contrasting the patient heart with the impatient heart and suggesting that both are required for a strong relationship. Patience and urgency…. that seems kinda obvious.
Where I took issue with the article was mostly in the author’s observations about urgency. In talking about the impatient heart, he focused primarily on sexual desire – which, to me seems outdated (Freudian) and only acknowledges the most primal of urgencies. I would argue that urgency is so much more than sexual desire and changes with age and gender (biological clocks and all that). I suspect impatience manifests differently in 18-year-olds and 30-year-olds and 60-year-olds and so on. Admittedly, I don’t know nearly enough about the subject, and I could see a case being made in which sexual desire, the drive (urgency) to procreate, is seen as a biological manifestation of our attempts at grappling with mortality… What is our legacy? Our children? Our deeds? As we grow older and the desire/need/reality of having children diminishes, other forms of desire and legacy rise up – but they all seem related to this deep need to not only outlive ourselves, but make some sort of meaning out of all of this.
Of course, as I read, I was looking to identify my own experiences in the article. How have I experienced urgency and patience? How has that changed over time? For me, now, urgency is almost always about long-term, quality time as opposed to speed. It’s this feeling of, I like the way this person and I are with each other and I want to spend more time with them… which, in a romantic relationship, then becomes I want to spend as much time with them as I can…. which then becomes maybe we could spend this type of time together for a really long time. In the most urgent circumstances, those that have had what I can only describe as “chemistry,” it’s as if we were trying to make up for the years we didn’t know each other. That’s kind of a thrill – learning someone else’s depths and complexities… it has the effect of making us less self-absorbed and more generous.
As best as I can tell, urgency, while perhaps necessary, also tends to be a destructive force. Unchecked, this type of urgency can be an all consuming fire. On impatience, the author of the Psychology Today article, Aaron Ben-Zeév, quotes the poet W.H. Auden “Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise; because of impatience we cannot return.” Leave it to a poet to get to the heart of the matter. I’d also argue that urgency in relationships has a flip side – which is an urgency to flee. Framed as a lack of patience for the other, suddenly every minor annoyance becomes another justification for going, every disagreement becomes proof that it’s not working. The inner thoughts become, “I can’t keep doing this, I have to get out of this.” If you’ve been there (with a partner, a friend, a job, a habit) you know the snowball effect of those internal conversations.
So, what of patience? At the core, almost every failed relationship (professional, personal, romantic) is the result of someone’s impatience – by which I mean one person usually deciding I don’t want to do this anymore. But what is the breaking point? When does patience flip to impatience? When do the things that were previously tolerable become intolerable? I suspect this is a slow build that makes us really uncomfortable with our inner thoughts and our inability to be honest with ourselves (we usually want things to work, we seldom want to hurt other people, we recognize our lines in the sand shift as the sand shifts, but we also grow tired). Most people would agree that no one should stay in something that makes them unhappy, but how much time and work should we invest? What does it even mean to settle or to invest?
I’ve seen lots of dating profiles that will say something like “I refuse to settle” or “let’s not waste each other’s time.” This, to my ear, expresses a different type of urgency: efficiency. Efficiency (let’s not waste each other’s time), as I’m slowly discovering, is a form of being closed off to exploration. It can often be used as a safeguard against failure – let’s stick with what works. I suspect good and honest relationships have a messiness to them but remain open to lots of small failures. They become practiced in inefficiencies. They are explorations of both the other person and ourselves, which necessarily means risks, rewards, wrong turns, and discoveries both pleasant and unpleasant. The truth is, we could spend a lifetime trying to know someone and never get there… and maybe those are the questions we should ask… Instead of asking how long can I put up with x, y, or z, we might be better served by pulling back and asking, do I still find this person fascinating? Do I still want to get to know them? I suspect the best relationships see a type of joy in that effort – they tend to live in the details and worry less about the milestones. I believe that in those relationships, urgency becomes a slow burn and the relationship becomes more about the journey as opposed to the arrival.
But there’s another piece to all of this: waiting. On patience, Ben-Zeév quotes the poet Rumi, “Patience is not sitting and waiting, it is foreseeing. It is looking at the thorn and seeing the rose, looking at the night and seeing the day. Lovers are patient and know that the moon needs time to become full.” On waiting he writes:
Waiting is a state of allowing time to go by, “especially while staying in one place without doing very much, until you can do something.” Patience is a specific type of waiting. It requires “the ability to wait, or to continue doing something, despite difficulties” (Cambridge Dictionary). Waiting is often passive, while patience is typically dynamic—we continue doing something despite enduring hardship. Patience also involves delay, i.e., making something happen at a later time than expected, but it is a positive functional delay intended to nurture the right circumstances.
This seems like a valuable distinction to make and that both patience and waiting are important practices to cultivate.
If I have regrets/failures/struggles (probably more than I can count), they are usually tied to my inability to wait. In those relationships that had enough urgency to take off and in which I think I had the patience to see it through, what I often lacked was the ability to wait. I want to solve problems quickly. I want to get where we’re going so we can enjoy the show. I want to restore peace and balance quickly. I want to get through unpleasantness as quickly as possible. Waiting, is the pause button. It is the antidote to urgency. It creates the space for patience and reflection. It is what allows us to say, “I don’t need to act right now.” Waiting is a zen type of practice, waiting is what allows us to set others free with an almost resigned sense that “what is meant to be, will be,” or that the circumstances may become more favorable, or the problem may reveal itself differently. Waiting, in an increasingly impatient and demanding world, is hard.
For the better part of the last five years, I’ve been trying to understand how we (mostly I) relate to other people (strangers at a bar, friends, family, partners). For the past five years, I’ve been getting comfortable with the notion that the only legacy most of us leave behind is in the memories we leave with others. For the past five years, I’ve also been trying to figure out why I’ve had a sudden interest in these things and when my urgencies changed. The only answer I can come up with is the one we all experience – we’re too busy to pause. During much of my adult life, I spent my time doing the family thing… working, doing my part to maintain a marriage and a household, raising a child. I suppose in the midst of all of that, there wasn’t a lot of time (or will) to step back and contemplate the components of life or to really think about what balance looks and feels like.
Then, several years ago, after a relationship in which I left because I lacked the patience to really see the other person, I took a road trip and spent two days hiking alone in the mountains of Tennessee. At one of the views, I came to the conclusion that life is meant to be shared and that I (and most of us) need to learn how to share. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about waiting or patience and instead felt a sense of urgency to seek out, to share, etc. Another year passed, people came and went, and after another relationship ended (one in which I wanted to spend as much time with them as possible and had patience for the person, but maybe not the process), I made my best attempts at understanding and waiting…
I started this blog with the intent, among other things, of exploring my multitudes. I wanted to slow down. I wanted to explore relationships, people, myself, competing desires, urgency, patience, and waiting… all of it. At best, it’s been a rambling mess of contradictory ideas with a few nuggets of something approaching wisdom and none of the brevity of an article from Psychology Today. Most of what I write could be summed up in one or two sentences: think “and” instead of “or”; look for plurality instead of dichotomy; when in doubt, find the middle ground and the ways opposites are interwoven; find balance. As I was reading and thinking through these concepts, it struck me as odd how a word like urgency is so dependent on what it’s describing – urgency to build up or urgency to tear down. It struck me as odd that a concept like patience can also imply limits… we’re all patient, until we aren’t. Or that waiting can be a practice without a goal.