Photo by Tyler Milligan on Unsplash
Patience is a matter of months and years, not hours or days.
Explanation
Patience is the act of trusting God to bring something hoped for about. It is faith stretched toward infinity.
However, does that statement really matter in the face of actual practice? Not really. It may give you something to strive towards, but patience must be practiced. It is a skill humans must develop.
Having children is (or can be) an excellent way to learn to practice patience. When you’re in the midst of raising a small human, it can seem like every development milestone takes forever. Every improvement to discipline and behavior never seems to happen. And yet, if you look back, it seems like only yesterday that they were having trouble with something they no longer have struggled with for months or years.
I have also often said that the only difference between a software engineer and other humans is how patient they are with computers. A software engineer’s patience must stretch toward the infinite. You can struggle to get things done for days and when you realize what you were struggling with, you realize it shouldn’t have taken that long. The human-computer interface is so literal, it is extremely difficult for humans to bridge and computers simply couldn’t do it (at least, until recently with the proliferation of large language models).
So, practice patience. If you are impatient after seconds, work to stretch your sense of urgency to minutes. If you are impatient after minutes, calm yourself until you are content to wait for hours. If you are impatient after a few hours, learn to breathe easy and sleep for days on it. If you are impatient after days, yearn for contentment that lasts weeks. When you are content for weeks, let your hope last for months and then to years.
If you can do this, you will be much closer to finding contentment.
Cheers.