How the problem of patience arises

¶One: Setting out the situations

Someone has been unjustly imprisoned, and we advise them to be patient. What does patience mean here? Accepting the reality of imprisonment without regarding it as just? Remaining steadfast in the face of the injustice they have suffered and continuing their efforts to prove their innocence? Or accepting that very injustice and submitting to the situation? If our advice to be patient prevents them from exercising their right to protest and obscures the oppressor’s responsibility, does that advice not itself help perpetuate injustice? Is everything we call patience a virtue, or might some of the behaviours and forms of advice that go by this name even amount to vice?

We are visiting someone who is ill and worn down by pain, and we tell them to be patient. What do we mean? Enduring pain without care, or showing patience throughout the course of care and treatment they have begun? Are we asking them to bear the necessary wait, or are we using the words ‘be patient’ to brush aside their questions and complaints? Are we prescribing patience to ease their distress, or to avoid facing a painful problem ourselves? Here, too, we need to be clear about what takes time, what needs to be done and who is responsible for doing it.

A worker has lost their job. They and their family are struggling to make ends meet. They spend their days searching for suitable, decent work and have grown weary of their efforts coming to nothing. We advise them, too, to be patient. Do we mean that they should continue along the same path they have followed in recent days? For how long, and with what prospect in view? What is patience here? Continuing the search, putting it on hold or changing the way they search? If their method of looking for work needs to change, should repeating it without alteration be called patience? In that case, how does patience differ from persistence in following the same method?

To understand and assess advice to be patient, hearing the word alone is not enough; we need to consider the situation in which the advice is given. Language takes on meaning within the field of experience. In the examples above, we encountered three situations and the same advice: ‘Be patient!’ But this sameness of wording does not, by itself, make clear what is being asked of the person addressed in each situation.

In the first example, the problem is how patience is distinguished from submission to injustice; in the second, how it continues to go hand in hand with care; and in the third, when carrying on gives way to a change of method. Are we dealing with different meanings of patience, or is there a common meaning at work whose practical demands vary from one situation to another?

¶Two: Patience — a problem, not an answer

Let us return to the same advice, repeated in all three situations: ‘Be patient!’ When we advise someone to be patient, have we placed a solution before them, or have we asked something of them that itself needs explanation? If a patient who has come to see a doctor were met with the command ‘Get well’, would they leave the consulting room satisfied and content? ‘Get well’ is a command to achieve an outcome, but what the patient needs is a prescription that sets out a course of care and treatment.

This does not mean that advice to be patient can never form part of an answer. We may understand the situation, have taken the necessary action and know that we must now wait for a definite period of time. But general advice to be patient is not, in itself, an answer to the problem. Unless it is clear what must be endured, for what purpose and alongside what action, and under what conditions this advice should be reconsidered, ‘be patient’ raises further questions rather than showing the way forward.

Where are the answers to these questions to be found? The problem of patience cannot be resolved without attending to the situation. Patience takes on meaning in its embodied form and the circumstances surrounding it: that is, in relation to the capacities and needs of the person exercising it, what they are facing, and the relationships and conditions that have brought this encounter about.

It follows that understanding patience is not confined to understanding an individual’s inner state. We need to ask why they have come to be in this situation, what possibilities are open to them, who plays a part in bringing it about or changing it, and who bears the cost of waiting. The person offering advice is not exempt from these questions. If we ask someone else to be patient, we must be able to explain what responsibility we ourselves bear in the meantime.

What counts as judicious patience in one situation may, in another, lead to care being postponed or to fruitless repetition. Yet the fact that patience depends on the situation does not mean that it has no shared structure. If we regard the prisoner, the patient and the worker as all facing the problem of patience, we must be able to show how their different experiences are related.

To do this, we need to distinguish two questions:

1. What conditions give rise to the problem of patience?

2. What makes our response to this problem a patient one?

This essay addresses the first question. Calm, hope, perseverance or judgement may come into play when we examine the response; but we should not assume in advance that they are conditions for the problem to arise. Someone who lacks calm or hope may still find themselves facing the problem of patience. We must first understand what kind of situation confronts us with the problem of patience, and then consider how to be patient.

¶Three: The elements that give rise to the problem of patience

The problem of patience takes shape in the relationship between what we want, our continuing encounter with a situation over time and the limits of our control. We do not always choose the situation that calls for patience; but even when we choose to embark on a path, we cannot fully control the time it takes or the difficulty it involves.

Someone may deliberately begin learning a skill yet be unable to eliminate the interval between starting out and becoming competent simply by wanting to. Choosing a path is therefore compatible with finding ourselves faced with the problem of patience. Sometimes a situation is imposed on us; at other times, on a path we have chosen, we encounter a limitation that does not yield to our immediate wishes.

To begin the discussion, we can distinguish three elements:

First: There is a situation that is not as I want it to be

This undesirability can take two forms: either I want something that has not come about, or something has come about that I do not want. We call it an undesirable situation when what is wanted does not come about, or when what is unwanted does. Undesirability here refers to this relationship: to the fact that something in the present situation is at odds with what I want. What I want may be relief from suffering, the restoration of a right or the attainment of a goal.

But there is a fundamental difference between ‘it has not happened yet’ and ‘it will never happen’. A prisoner may be waiting for the end of their sentence or for their innocence to be established; here, we are dealing with something that has not yet happened. The return of someone who has died is not of the same kind. The impossibility of their return cannot be understood simply as a longer wait; the passage of time does not, in itself, make the impossible possible.

In such a situation, if we speak of the problem of patience, we need to clarify what it concerns: we are facing a loss that continues over time, not a return that has merely been delayed. Our relationship to the loss may change, without the loss itself being undone. To understand the problem of patience, then, we must ask what we want and what, in this situation, can change.

Second: Our encounter with this situation extends over time

A wish may arise in a moment, but the situation does not necessarily change in that same moment. Treatment, the handling of a claim for justice and learning a skill are processes that unfold over time. In the case of loss, too, what continues over time is our encounter with a reality at odds with what we want.

The gap between what is and what we want thus takes on a temporal dimension for us. What we must endure is not only the undesirability of the situation, but also its continuation. At times, we experience time as a resistance to our will: we want suffering to end right now, a right to be restored right now or an ability to be acquired right now, yet what we want does not happen at the very moment we want it. ‘Friction’ here names this experience: the time of wanting and the time of change do not coincide.

Third: My will alone is not sufficient to determine the outcome

The fact that my will is my own does not mean that the realisation of what I want is entirely within my control. I can want something and make a decision, yet the outcome depends on factors and processes that are not determined by my decision. Nor does the fact that my will is not enough mean that it has no effect. My efforts may be necessary without, on their own, guaranteeing the outcome.

Speaking of the gap and of friction also brings us to ‘the other’: to whatever is involved in this situation other than my own wishes. ‘The other’ here is not just another person. The body, natural conditions, social relations and processes such as learning may not be subject to my immediate command either. Sometimes something must be done by someone else; sometimes an obstacle must be removed; and sometimes a process must unfold that cannot be shortened simply by my wanting it to.

Nor does the fact that an obstacle is internal necessarily make it a matter of indecision. I may know what I want, yet find it difficult to change a longstanding habit or keep practising. Being undecided about what I want is not the same as being limited in my ability to bring it about. The problem of patience therefore cannot be confined to encounters with external obstacles.

These three elements can be understood as three interconnected aspects of the conditions in which the problem of patience arises: the relationship between the situation and what we want, the continuation of the encounter over time and the limits of the will’s influence. The temporal aspect and the limits of our control are related, but they draw our attention to two different dimensions: one concerns the continuation of the encounter, and the other concerns what prevents us from having complete control over the outcome.

For any of us, patience may be a word in the dictionary that we have often heard or even used. In this formulation, it becomes a ‘problem’ when we face a situation at odds with what we want, our encounter with it continues over time and our will alone is not sufficient to determine the outcome. Our next question is what counts as a patient response to this problem, and under what conditions it can be regarded as a virtue.