Has Time Lost Its Patience?

Has time lost its patience with people or have people lost their patience with time?

 

Recently, Simona Halep was defeated in the final match of the Cincinnati tournament. I did not watch it, but I heard from the news how her coach told her to calm down, to be patient, to stop getting angry. I gave this a lot of thought: she has been training on a daily basis for so many years and even so she still loses her temper. A match of this type is probably like a marathon – everything is well thought, calculated and at the same time it requires your presence, alertness, reactivity. I am not an expert in tennis; however, I thought about how often it happens to all of us to commit to something, such as a project and soon enough to lose our patience, to get angry, to blame others for our failures and in the end to abandon the project.

I have a friend whom I admire a lot for his resilience. He went through tough moments professionally, but especially personally. Even so he always knows never to quit, he knows how to find the power within himself to move on, to look at life through different lenses. I told him many times that whenever it gets difficult for me I think about him and what he would do – and he modestly replies: it is not a big deal, you always exaggerate, others would do the same. A level of humility that we rarely find in someone and the trademark of a good man.

I also know people who give up easily: they get a job somewhere, stick around for a few months, they dislike a particular thing, and they leave; they enter a project, things do not happen as they wish and then they abandon it. It is the same with relationships – today you are together, next week you are not. It seems as if everything is a commodity; it is similar to going to a shop, trying some clothes on, then throwing them away and then rinse and repeat. To take responsibility for a project, a job, a relationship, to do everything in our powers to make them work, all of them have become out of date. Most of the time we no longer have the patience for anything, for no one.

We are like bumble bees which fly from flower to flower but without the patience of a bee to build a hive.

And so, I ask myself: has time lost its patience with people or have people lost their patience with time?