Patience is not one of our strong points. We want everything now. It’s hard to wait two days anymore to get what we bought on the internet. The new car or new house we dream of seems so far into our future. Our planned vacation, that is scheduled for July, seems like it will take forever for us to be able to enjoy it.
Why patience needs to happen is because everything takes time. This weekend showed me this in simple ways.
We bought a new sink and we needed the plumber to re-connect our piping. It took him about an hour-and-a-half to finish the work with a trip to the hardware store included.
When I cut our grass it takes an hour to do.
A machine at work kept losing today’s date. It took me about two hours to open the unit, figure out it had a battery, go to the store to get a new one, install the battery, reconnect the unit and then put it back on the production line.
My wife wanted to replace the hardware on our kitchen cabinets. Having bought the new hardware I spent nearly three hours to do half of the cabinets with two trips to the hardware store because I bought the wrong screws to attach the handles to the drawers.
These are all rather simple tasks. Nothing complicated. But each one of them took time. Combined it took seven and a half hours to complete all of these things in one day.
The artist and the craftsman never look at the time it took to complete something. Their work is their joy and the end result their celebration.
It’s we the novices, with little knowledge of the path we are on with respect to a goal or a task, that want to rush and get something done. With more complex things like building our lives or accumulating wealth we tire much too easily because we forget that everything takes time.
The amount of time needed is in proportion to the task. The harder and greater value the task has, the longer it will take. As you read, if simple tasks take time, tasks that lead to accomplished goals will take much longer.
Now that you know this don’t let your impatience make you stop before you get there.