Impatience is a Virtue
Originally posted on Medium.
Impatience makes one focus only on the top-level outcome. It is to charge ahead with what one wants to see.
Yes, we have all heard your touts of tranquility and composure. We are all too aware of such “virtues” but what have they given you? Little I imagine.
The sparsity of your waiting should not surprise you. The lioness does not wait, she funnels and flows life into her jaws. Stalk, pursue, ambush.
“But you will achieve the wrong thing.”
Of course I will achieve the wrong thing, for all things are wrong. But in the flow of that wrongness is the learning I covet, which brings forth the ever-better; converging on what works.
The complexity of life will not coincide under stillness. It will precipitate neither utility nor beauty by static ignorance. It is naive motion that brings forth invariant patterns that ring true.
One must know the difference between patience and having naive perseverance; the kind of perseverance that always tries to make things happen right away.
You can be the rock or you can make the rock.
I choose to be the river.
I claim impatience as the truer human virtue.
I will be adding "impatience is a virtue" to my portfolios of aphorisms!
Brings to mind a Heideggerian/Taoist aphorism we use around the house:
"Action is its own sight"
i.e., it is in the response to your actions that you see what the situation is.
This is obvious in a situation like throwing rocks into the brush to flush out birds.
But it is nearly universally true.