Patience Isn’t My Virtue, But I’m Working on It

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A friend remarked the other day that we should not attempt to retrieve some tools from my shop because it was “rush hour.” Rush hour? In Longview? I suppose there is an increase in traffic in the morning, at noon and 5 p.m., though I can still get to work on the other side of town in less than 10 minutes. Still, I get impatient when it takes two cycles to get through a traffic light on the loop.

But when I go to Austin or Dallas, my mindset changes. I expect to get stuck in traffic, to watch I-635 turn into a parking lot as we head to NorthPark Center, or to move at a snail’s pace toward Guero’s in South Austin at 5 p.m. That is just part of living in a large city. One gets used to it. I spend a lot of time listening to National Public Radio while driving in big cities.

Here in East Texas, if a wreck backs up traffic for a few blocks, I end up detouring through neighborhoods to get around the obstacle — even if it means actually driving farther and likely taking more time to get where I’m going. I’ll mutter under my breath when stuck at a traffic light downtown without a single vehicle coming from the other direction. Sometimes this can cost me a full 30 seconds! Oh, the frustration.

The smaller the town I have lived in, the less patient I was. Even the slightest delay seemed an unacceptable inconvenience. I once lived in a town with one stoplight. One could walk/jog from one end of this burg to the other in about 15 minutes — not that I ever did anything that foolish. That stoplight was my nemesis. It did not matter which direction I was headed. The light was red. I ran that light so many times when nobody was coming that a red-light camera company could have taken its employees on a cruise for my fines.

This lack of patience boils over into technology. My two computers — an iMac and a souped-up Mac Pro laptop — are without question the fastest computers I have owned since I bought my first Mac more than 30 years ago. Heck, three decades ago the average personal computer did not possess a smidgen of the power and speed of today’s smart phone — at 10 times the cost.

Still, here I am mumbling under my breath, waiting for Photoshop to open, complaining about slow Internet speeds, Googling ways to make my machine faster. And my laptop probably has more computing power than NASA had to launch Apollo 11 to the moon.

I have no idea if that is true so, of course, I Googled it. It turns out, according to a site called zmescience.com, my iPhone is nearly 33,000 times faster than the fastest Apollo-era computers. And I bought it at AT&T for about $400. NASA’s computers at the time cost $3.5 million apiece.

Nevertheless, I complain, and listen to others complain. I had an epiphany the other day. We are spoiled rotten! We have become entitled, rarely stopping to marvel at the changes technology has wrought in a few decades. It spills over into how we regard health care. We expect that whatever ails us to be fixed when we go to the doctor, with a prescription, an injection or minimally invasive surgery. And the strides made in medical procedures are astounding. So we — at least some of us — have come to expect to be “fixed” and quickly, even if our own poor choices put us in a precarious position.

So what are we to do? I can only speak for myself. I have made a late New Year’s resolution: to acquire patience, whether it is when stuck in small-town traffic, or waiting for a video to load on the Mac. And to continue to eat better and exercise a lot, a path I began about six months ago.

And when I get frustrated, to recite Romans 12:12: Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

We will see if this proves successful.

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