Patience Pt. 2 Living With Patience Anyway
Technology is slowly buying up real estate in your mind in order to give you constant stimulation and fulfill your most immediate desires. But…that also means that it is becoming part of you. It’s making decisions for you, solving problems for you, determining what you desire, and identifying new things for you to desire. Now, you probably want to say that you’re just using technology to help you make decisions, solve problems, determine what you desire, and identify new things to desire. But I don’t think that’s totally accurate for many within our culture today, and it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story.
If your life was an epic poem…you would be the hero. Right? At least I hope we’re all the heroes of our own lives. Sometimes I don’t feel like I am, but anyway, you grow up in a place you call home. And no matter how good or bad your home is, there is a certain level of comfort there. It’s your normal. It is known to you. You understand the patterns of it, and you can predict it. Ok. Then one day, you venture off into the unknown – a place where your certainties began to dissolve and you’re faced with doubt. You have to adapt. You have to adjust your view of the world to make sense of this new information. In order to make the necessary adjustments, you have to call upon everything you learned while you were growing up at home. You use all that learned information to slay the dragons you encounter out there in the unknown, and in the course of slaying the dragon, you learn something new and amazing that you can bring back home with you and impart this new wisdom to those who are still blind to it. And that’s the basic structure of an epic poem.
So for those of us born after the advent of the worldwide web, computer technology was an integral part of our growing up, so it feels normal and safe and predictable. And as we venture off into the unknown, computers have naturally become a way for us to adjust to our new surroundings and become tools for us to slay our dragons. But I think we have to ask ourselves if we’re using computers to slay our dragons in the same way an ancient hero would have used a sword or a bow and arrow – as an extension of themselves. Or is there something more sinister going on here?
I would argue that we are making computer technology the hero of our own epic poem. The computer is the one going out into the unknown and bringing back new information for us to assimilate into our own blueprints of the world. We are making Google and Youtube the heroes in our stead. We ask them to journey off into the wilderness and come back with something new. We want a new recipe, we turn to Google. We want new music to listen to, we turn to youtube or Spotify or pandora or whatever. Now the problems with that are multi-headed like the hydra. But one major problem is that we end up in a feedback loop, because Google and Youtube are feeding us information based on information that we’ve already given them. So when we search for NEW recipes or music, the computer is only going to be able to spit back to us information that is compatible with or similar to information that we’ve already given them. You are not going out into the unknown yourself, you’re sending a proxy, so you’re never going to learn in the same way you would if you were toe to toe with the dragon yourself. You’re never leaving your safe zone, so you’ll never really learn anything new. It will all just be a copy of what you already know.
Ok now what does this have to do with patience? Patience is decaying in our culture, because of the way we are using computers to fight our battles for us. Let’s say you’re in the doctor’s waiting room, and it’s a half hour or so before you get called back and then another half hour or so in the exam room before you get to see the doctor. What are you probably doing for most of that hour? You’re probably on your phone – checking emails, posting on social media or reading your friends posts, playing Words With Friends or Fruit Ninja or something, surfing the web, texting your friends…whatever.
That visit to the doctor’s office could have been a few stanzas in your epic poem. You’re probably at the office, because you have some symptoms, so there’s an element of uncertainty there, which is probably causing anxiety, which is probably something that you should be processing and dealing with. You’re in a strange environment where the rules are unclear with strange people you know nothing about. There is very little certainty about how the time should best be passed in that environment and how best to interact with the people around you. The dragon here could be doubt or anxiety or loneliness or fear. Or maybe you could face all those dragons all at once. Instead, we run into the corner and hide behind our smart phones, so we never have to face those dragons. And our phone withstands the heat of the dragon’s fire-breath until the wait is over, and we learn nothing. And since we learned nothing that time, we don’t have the tools we need the next time we find ourselves in a situation that requires patience, so we bust out our phones all over again and do the same exact thing every time. We hide. And we end up trapped in this feedback loop that we don’t have the tools to break out of. The dragons have us trapped in a cave unless we learn what we have to learn to defeat them. So oddly, enough, by making our computer the hero of our own epic poem, it actually becomes the villain in our own lives.
Ok. So I have some tips for us for all to help us develop more patience in a world bent on crushing it…
Put down your phone and experience life to the fullest. Drink it all in. Even the hard parts, because it’s in the difficult places where we can find the most truth. You will not be disappointed.
As I say in Patience Pt. 1, patience is a network of other values all working together. You can’t demonstrate patience without being humble, generous, empathetic, self-disciplined, and creative. So the more you work on developing those traits in your life, the more patient you will find yourself becoming. Well, ok, so how do you develop those things? You just do it. We all learn best by doing. Start out your day by saying, “I’m going to be more generous today.” And then you keep your mind open for opportunities to be generous, and you take them. You step out of your comfort zone and into the unknown. You reach out to your neighbors, your friends, your family, your coworkers in ways you never have before. Be generous with your time, with words of affirmation or encouragement, with acts of kindness. Give some money to a charity. Volunteer for a cause that interests you. Then the next day or the next week or the next month, work on being more humble. Make yourself a better person one little step at a time, and you’ll find patience to be so much easier. And don’t rip yourself out of your comfort zone and try to do things that are completely separate from who you are as a person. And don’t try to do everything all at once. It’s a process. Be patient with yourself, and allow yourself to fail a little on this journey. Set small, actionable goals. You got this!
Journey into the unknown. It might be easy for you to be patient at church or at work, but it’s a real challenge for you to be patient with your parents or your spouse. Work on being patient in places where it doesn’t come naturally for you. We all manifest ourselves differently in different settings or around different people. The great Swiss philosopher and psychologist, Jean Piaget, believed that you learn best by experiencing new things, by stepping out into unknown situations and adjusting your worldview ever so slightly in order to accommodate the new information you gain from experiencing the unknown. Learning is heroic. Learning is how you write the epic poem of your life. Piaget was a psychologist, but he had very little interest in IQ or standardized tests of any kind. He didn’t think that kind of data tells you anything about yourself. What is important is that you continue to learn and grow and develop, and you do that by putting yourself in new situations, by expanding your view of the world, by being willing to continually adjust your behaviors, beliefs, opinions, ideas as you learn more about the world. It’s a constant becoming. Becoming better. Becoming braver. Becoming wiser. Piaget would say that the knowledge you acquire in life is only as valid as the process you use to learn it. The more directly you interact with and experience the knowledge, the more valid your understanding of it will be. You have to go out into the unknown and face the dragon to get the fullness of knowledge. If you rely on a computer to do that work and you never go out of your comfort zone, you will never experience more than half-truths. Think about it this way – you’re at a restaurant and you’re considering getting the buffet instead of ordering off the menu, but you don’t know what’s on the buffet. You ask your friend to go scout it out and bring back a report. So she does, and she tells you they have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and macaroni and cheese – all your favorites. You’re sold. You purchase the buffet. Then, when you get up there to assemble your dinner, you realize that the chicken has been sitting out all day. It’s cold and dry. The mashed potatoes are instant, which you hate, and the mac and cheese isn’t at all the way your Grandma used to make it. If you don’t get out and experience life and struggle and fail and get back up and fight again, then you’re only ever going to glimpse half-truths.
Practice delaying gratification. Purposely wait for things that you really want. You really want ice cream or that last piece of chocolate cake in the fridge, then you gotta wait for it. Set a goal. Wait for the next morning or until the end of the week. I do this with Mountain Dew all the time. Mountain Dew is my arch nemesis. I absolutely love it with a passion, but all the sugar in it just crushes me. So I tell myself, “you can’t have any until Monday” or “you can’t have any until Friday.” And oh….then it just tastes so good. Once you develop the self-control it takes to delay gratification successfully, I think you’ll be amazed at the opportunities it opens up in your life.
Yeah! Go crush it. This life is just waiting for you to reach out and grab it. Live life to the fullest! You’ve got all the power inside you to make your life better. Fight for every day, because every day is worth it!
