Patience Is a Form of Devotion

Patience in a man who does not want anything is not patience. It is indifference wearing a good coat.

This is the confusion at the centre of it. People praise the calm man, the unhurried one, and assume they are watching a virtue, when frequently they are watching an absence. He is not waiting well. He has nothing at stake and so there is nothing in him to master, and a still surface over an empty room is not an achievement. It costs him nothing and it means nothing, and I have never been interested in it.

What interests me is the other thing, which shares no border with it. A man who wants intensely, who is not pretending otherwise, whose whole system is oriented towards a thing, and who stays. Not because he has talked himself out of the wanting. The wanting is fully operational. He simply does not act on it, and does not petition, and does not find sideways routes, and does not manufacture reasons why the terms might reasonably be revisited. That is not calm. Underneath it there is considerable pressure. And the holding of it, quietly, over time, without making it my problem, is the most articulate thing a man has ever said to me.

Because notice what impatience actually communicates. It says the wanting is more real to him than the arrangement is. That is all it says. Every attempt to hurry a thing is a small announcement that his appetite outranks his agreement, and once that is established, everything else he offers is provisional. It will hold only until the appetite is loud enough. He does not intend this. He would deny it. But it is in the asking, plainly, every time.

Patience says the reverse and says it without a word. It says the agreement is load bearing. It says that whatever he feels, and he feels it, the structure holds anyway, and it holds when nobody is enforcing it, and it holds on the evenings when the feeling is at its worst. That is not a statement he could make by declaring it. Declarations are free. This one is expensive and it is paid in instalments and I can see every one of them.

And there is a thing that happens to a man who practises this, which I do not think he anticipates. The wanting does not diminish, but his relationship to it inverts. He stops experiencing it as a demand that must be resolved and starts experiencing it as a condition he can inhabit. That is an enormous change. Most men have never once inhabited a want. They have only ever fled it, forwards, into the nearest available satisfaction, and so they have never found out what is on the other side of the fourth day.

I have not told you to be patient. I want to be clear about that, because if I had told you it would be compliance and compliance is a different substance. I have simply made it necessary and then said nothing further, and what you do in that silence is entirely yours, and I am watching, and I will not mention it when you succeed.

The waiting is not the price of the thing. It is the thing, made visible, in a form I can actually read.