The Art Of Patience - Learning To Be Like The Tortoise
January 15, 2008 | In Making A Diff. Lifestyle |
I have a trait that probably drives my family nuts at times: when I decide to go for something, I really go for it! I get bursts of inspiration and motivation and I start immediately acting on my ideas. While that may seem great, I’ve often found that this approach has drawbacks.
Photo by ndrwfgg
The first drawback is information overload. I want to know everything I can about the subject and I want to know it now. Fortunately, I’m a fast reader, and I’m also good at retaining information in the short term. Combined with good note taking, if the subject is focused enough it will only take me a couple of days before I’m reading the same information over again and not finding anything new. However, the environment has many problems, and I’m finding that it’s difficult to get a clear focus on one topic. Even though I’ve narrowed my focus to one geographic location, there is still a lot of information and I often find myself overwhelmed.
The second drawback is that with this information overload, I get so many ideas for what to do, that I’m not sure where to start. And, when I do start, I wonder if maybe I should have done a different step first. The first seeds of doubt take root and sometimes they grow big enough that I stop completely.
The third drawback is that I get excited about taking action and then get expectations that I can fix things or radically change everything with just that first action. Since this is rarely the case, when the truth sets in, I tend to get enormously disappointed.
Sometimes, I’ve Been Warned
I also tend to overlook the warnings that I’ve read about how difficult the task I have set myself will be. Part of the reason is because I do pick up on things very quickly, although I often overestimate my abilities when the new task is different than anything I’ve ever done before. I’ve done that with blogging about becoming an activist. I’ve never been an activist before, and I’ve never blogged about a new project either. Although I had this idea at the start that I wouldn’t be that hard. After all, I like to write and I like to research, right?
Another part of the reason I overlook difficulties is because, as a visual learner, I can’t picture something I’ve never done before. I had a picture of me as an activist, but I didn’t have a clear picture of how I will get there. I also didn’t have a clear picture of the blogging aspect. I could picture myself writing because I’ve done that before. However, in the past, I haven’t had the deadline of posting regularly on a subject I’m still learning about. It’s closer to writing a mini research project every day than anything else. I didn’t have that picture, so I overestimated my ability to do it easily. As I’m finding being an activist and blogging about it every day isn’t easy. It’s not difficult, exactly, but it requires dicipline and effort that I hadn’t originally anticipated.
Successful Candidate Will Possess Patience
It also requires patience and I’ve never been a patient person that I can recall. Over the past several years, perhaps as part of spending lots of time with my niece, I’ve learned some patience. Although on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being totally patient and 1 being totally impatient, I’ve gone from about a 3 to a 5 (or maybe 6). Better, but certainly a lot of room for improvement.
It’s slowly seeping into my brain that in order to live my dream, I need to cultivate patience. The more I learn about the environment, the more I realize the problems are more complex than I initially thought. I’m also becoming aware of the amount of work that will be required to fix the problem. When I wrote my eulogy, I had done some research and I thought the main thing holding back progress was lack of cooperation. While I realize now that may still be the biggest problem, it’s not a simple problem and there are hundreds of other factors that I wasn’t aware of. This problem is bigger than one person can tackle alone, especially one person who is gung ho one week and out of energy the next.
Behavior Change
One of the main steps to living my dream is changing my behavior. It involves becoming more physically active, which will improve my health and my outlook. It will also give me energy go keep working and desire to visit my local park and keep picking up trash. It involves cutting down on my spending. This will help my finances, as well as the environment because I won’t be buying as much, or producing as much trash from packaging.
Not only is changing behavior hard in general since adult brains resist change for any length of time, but it’s doubly (or even more so) hard when you’re an impatient person. I’m realizing that my feeling brain, that part of me that reacts instinctively as if I was only 4 years old, is leading the show. She (my inner 4 year old), just stomps her feet and says, “I don’t want to!”Instead, I need to let my thinking brain, the adult part that “gets” logical arguments, run the show. She (the adult me), can smile and say, “I know you don’t want to, but sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. Besides, it might be fun…” For instance, the idea of cooking from scratch makes a lot of sense. But, it wasn’t until I remembered how much fun I had cooking with my husband instead of alone, that the idea actually appealed to me. Otherwise, heating up prepackaged food is more appealing.
Keeping On Keeping On
Dealing with a 4 year old can be very trying at times. However, it can also be very rewarding and downright fun. I’ve found this to be true not just with my neice, but also with my inner 4 year old. The more fun and lighthearted I can make a task, the more likely I am to do it, regardless of how practical the task is. And, the more fun something is as I go along, the more I will stick with it. So, what I’m finding is that patience isn’t just the ability to wait things out, but also the ability to stop and reframe a difficult task into one that is more fun to do. Granted, this isn’t always easy, or possible, but more often than not, reframing works.
It’s said that patience is a virtue. While I can’t say that I’ve got loads of the stuff, I’m definitely learning to be virtuous and have come a long way. Being an activist is a long road and patience is needed to keep going as well as for the activist work itself. Therefore, I’ll keep moving, even if it’s only a little bit at a time.
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It sounds like your learning rapidly.
For me finding a way to make something fun is very important. (I think discipline has value as an emergencey measure, but as a lifestyle it sucks bigtime.)
A thought on complexity. When we are familiar enough with a situation it can be a plus. An example: how to increase the amount of organic produce, reduce packaging, get good exercise, and reduce our stress levels all at once? Start a vegie garden. (Of course this only works for property owners).
Evan,
Sorry I didn’t respond for a couple of days!
Well, I am learning some things rapidly - mostly that I’ve still got a lot to learn!
I think discipline has a lot of value for lifestyle, in that forcing ourselves to be disciplined about certain things over and over makes them a habit. Once we do them enough times, we can drop the strict discipline because they are just part of our life now. However, I do agree that having a rigid structure, with no room for flexibility, with discipline around every corner does make for a crappy life.
Ah, complexity. But, many things that seem complex are really not so when you look at them, even if they appeared so at first. Like your example of the veggie garden. Growing your own veggies is one act that has many benefits. Although, the process of growing veggies has it’s complexities. So, I guess that’s the trade off. As for being a property owner, if I stay living in my current apartment, I’m going to look into container gardening. I know this will limit the range of what I can grow, but it will allow for a few things, if only herbs/spices.