Patiently Persistent

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between patience and persistence.

I suspect they’re really two sides of the same coin.

Because being patient isn’t necessarily about sitting around and doing nothing. Sometimes patience requires a tremendous amount of persistence.

I think of patience this way:

Waiting the time that it takes.

And that sounds simple enough . . . until you’re the one doing the waiting.

We live in a world that seems to have very little tolerance for waiting. We want the result. We want it now. And if it doesn’t happen quickly enough, we start wondering if something’s wrong.

But sometimes nothing is wrong.Sometimes things just take the time they take.

Think about a baseball player. There’s a phrase they use: “Let the game come to you.”

It doesn’t mean you sit on the bench and hope something happens. You still have to show up. You still have to practice. You still have to take your swings.

In other words, I’m all for making things happen.

That takes persistence.

But after you’ve done everything you can do, there’s often a period when you have to stop pushing . . . and let things develop.

That takes patience.

And maybe that’s where patience and persistence come together.

You persist in being patient.

Patience takes practice . . . and practice takes persistence.

I know I’ve been guilty of giving up too soon.I’ve started something, put some effort into it, and when the result didn’t show up as quickly as I wanted, I decided it probably wasn’t working.

Maybe it wasn’t that it wasn’t working.

Maybe I just didn’t wait long enough.

And then there’s the other side of this.

There are some things that are never going to work.

You can persist and persist and persist . . . and all you’re really doing is spinning your wheels.

So how do you know the difference?

How do you know when something needs more patience . . . and when it’s time to let it go?

I wish I had a formula for that.

I don’t.

It reminds me of the old story about the judge who was asked to define pornography. He supposedly said, “I can’t define it . . . but I’ll know it when I see it.”

I think knowing when to stop can be a little like that.

For me, it has become more of a feeling.

As I get older, I find myself trusting that feeling more.

There’s a point where something inside me seems to say, Enough. Or as the Italians say, "Basta."

Not, You failed.

Not, This was a bad idea.

Just . . . enough.

And maybe that’s the signal to take all that persistence you’ve been applying in one direction . . . and apply it somewhere else.

Because persistence isn’t the same thing as refusing to quit.

Sometimes persistence means staying with something.

And sometimes it means having the courage to walk away from it.

The trick, I think, is learning the difference.

And that takes patience, too.

Patience with the process.

Patience with ourselves.

And perhaps most of all, enough patience to wait until we can feel whether it’s time to keep going . . . or time to let go.

Life has a way of reminding us that cakes take a certain amount of time to bake.

You can’t keep opening the oven every thirty seconds to see if it’s done.

At some point, you put the cake in the oven, you do what you can do . . . and you wait the time that it takes.

And while you’re waiting, you pay attention.

Because sooner or later, you’ll know.

Keep going . . .

or move on.

That, to me, is being patiently persistent.

All the best,

John