How to be patient
What we learned from Series 49 of Walk the Pod
This month, your Walk the Pod subscriber only series covered the fascinating topic of patience. We learned from highly accomplished writers Margaret Atwood, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, that patience is the ‘master key’ to a creative life.
I am not naturally a patient person. I’m keen to dive into new opportunities, look into please take boxes, rampage through bookshops, discover new people, get into everything, taking on opportunities as if I have infinite hours in the day in which to enjoy them. This is something I’ve had to battle with a great deal over the years, patience remains a daily challenge.
As always though, I take advice from those who spent a lifetime trying to cultivate this difficult practice. Here are a few of the things I’ve discovered:
Patience is everything
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said ‘Patience is everything!’ Being an artist is about continuing on ‘as though eternity lay before’ us, like a tree standing, ‘confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer’.
According to Rilke, we must develop our creative practice as if we had all the time in the world. How can we do this? Perhaps by refusing to look too far ahead. Looking at calendars, planning things in advance on a regular basis can lead to overwhelm. When I have to plan, I have found it helpful to use a ‘shutdown mantra’ for my planner: ‘Thank-you-planner-that-is-the-end-goodbye.’ Once the planner is closed, I try to live in the moment as much as possible, until such time as I have to spend some more time looking ahead.
Patience in nature
Margaret Atwood cited water as the ultimate natural force in patience. Water feels like a caress when we touch it. It doesn’t feel forceful or strong. But it goes where it wants to go, and can wear away a stone over a thousand years.
Patience: a daily struggle
I was reassured that even the wise humans I’ve been quoting throughout Series 49 struggled with maintaining patience. Rilke explains his own struggles: ‘I learn it daily, learn it with pain, to which I am grateful: patience is everything!’
It’s an interesting observation that some virtues need to be learned daily. Unlike learning a new skill, where once it is learned it is basically there for life, or learning a dynamic skill like surgery where we must learn the latest techniques in order to remain fully up to date, the daily requirement to learn something like patience is more like sweeping a floor. It involves overcoming. We must sweep, every day, or the dust and debris return. Thank you to Ryan Holliday for this analogy which appears in his brilliant book, Ego Is the Enemy.
How to be patient
So how do we develop patience, especially when there is so much rushing about and hurry in the world?
Take one day at a time. Try to be in the present moment.
Restrict planning: When we have to plan, restrict time spent planning to a minimum. Then say, ‘Thank-you-planner-that-is-the-end-goodbye.' or a similar shutdown mantra that works for you.
Have a few different things to concentrate on at once. If we feel particularly anxious that something is not moving fast enough, is there something else we can distract ourselves with?
Consume sports and hobbies that have patience woven through them. Like cricket, or gardening. May Sarton on gardening: “Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone. What will can do, and the only thing it can do, is make time in which to do it. Young poets, enraged because they don’t get published right away, confuse what will can do and what it can’t. It can’t make a tree peony grow to twelve feet in a year or two, and it can’t force the attention of editors and publishers. What it can do is create the space necessary for achievement, little by little.”
Sandbag yourself. If you want to be patient with something, to learn it and master it over a long period of time, but you know you will be tempted to do other things, make bold moves to prevent yourself from straying too far. I remember reading an interview with a drummer who had gotten tattoos all the way up both his arms to stop him from getting a proper job. This was in the early 2000’s, it probably wouldn’t be a job stopper now. Or at least it depends on your industry. Similarly you can build into your lifestyle the habits that you want to persist with, and make them daily to your routine, in order to make sure you do them.
This subscriber only series of Walk the Pod has been a lovely opportunity to think deeply about this counterintuitive value of patience. My radical prompt to you, dear friends, is to persevere with what you want to achieve against all the obstacles, blockers and gatekeepers, carefully paying attention to how the land lies, waiting for the next moment to try to move your project forward. Let me know how you get on.
If you have any thoughts about patience, or how you have incorporated a patience practice into your life, I’d love to get a discussion started in the comments. Thank you for reading.
Walk the Pod returns with Series 50 on Gifts, starting Monday 16 September.