Working with Time & not Against it
You can't force wisdom or change, you have to let it come to you
There’s a line in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed that has resonated for me in the years since I read the book
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
This quote comes from a moment near the end of the novel in which the main character, Shevek, who has been trying to find a middle road between the strict anarchism of his home moon, and the exploitative capitalism of its host planet, finally figures out how to thread the needle through the two. Rather than being frustrated by his years of failure, he is rather elated that those years have led to this great success. The patience and persistence that he has cultivated have finally paid off.
Lately, I’ve also been listening to a lot of the endurance guru Gordo Byrn while doing trainer rides. His big shtick is the 1000-day, or roughly three year, plan that encourages you to focus on longer time horizons for improvement. The focus of this mainly seems to be with building fitness for endurance sports, but can be applied to a lot of other things like finance, education, and personal relationships (indeed Gordo seems to take this approach with his family too, with seemingly pretty good results). This has got me thinking about my own life and how a more patient longer term view could have served me much better in many areas of my life. I can think of three big examples off of the top of my head.
First with endurance sports. I ran 14:41 for 3 miles at the Illinois state cross country meet my senior year of high-school, which was roughly ten years ago. I got marginally faster in college, up to about that speed for 5k, but haven't gotten any better, and have in fact probably regressed quite a bit since then (can maaaaaybe run a 16:00 5k right now). Part of this is just aging and reprioritizing things in my life, but there's a very real sense in which large periods of injury/illness/burnout has derailed my training because I was too aggressive and impatient and had to completely shut it down because I put myself in a huge hole. Of course it's far from too late, I'm only 27 and have at least another good 8-15 years to continue to improve with a less-aggressive, more balanced and kinder training plan focused on maximizing recovery.
Secondly with my scientific career, my publication record would be much improved and my doctorate would be complete if I had been more patient. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get results NOW, leading to overly complicated failed experiments that didn't produce any data that I could use in my thesis. If I had focused on this long term view (producing things that are real and useful and gradually building that number up over time), instead of trying to impress my bosses at our weekly meetings, I might have enough material to graduate. This is still something I need to work on, and is perhaps not helped by the weekly meeting structure in my lab. Also want to note that my publication record isn't particularly bad: I have one first author paper and multiple 2-3 author papers, and will have two more by the end of my PhD, I just think I could have accomplished this all faster and with less stress if I was more patient and systematic.
Finally, with romantic relationships, as many of you on this forum have probably observed, have suffered greatly from a lack of patience. In high school and college it was an impatience to be "in a relationship" which led me to be with people who were much more interested in me than I was in them. This is still part of the problem, but now there is an additional layer of impatience about wanting to get married and have children, which exacerbates the former problem. I'm both desperate for a partner and unwilling to actual discriminate between those who come my way because I'm impatient to get married and have children.
Contrast this to things in which I feel like I have applied patience. The foremost thing that comes to mind in my life is learning Spanish, which I've been doing consistently for the past 5 years. This past year I passed the DELE and consider myself functionally fluent, although there is still a ways to go in terms of what I would like to accomplish. This success came from the consistent 1-2 hour a day practice in the language. Another example is my blog, where I've slowly built up a following into the low hundreds, just by consistently publishing an article or two a month.
Yet on a meta-note, it also seems foolish to be upset that these insights about patience are coming to me only now, after five to ten years of “wasted time”. That kind of attitude is working against time, and not with it. Wisdom and insight come with the experience of living and cannot be forced, only encouraged.
Said woman, take it slow, it’ll work itself out fine
All we need is just a little patience.
I blog about language learning, biology, the science and art of learning, and many other things. If you feel inclined, please subscribe or consider buying me a coffee.
Josh