Patience vs. Progress

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness."
--George Santayana

I write a lot about the notion of patience. It is one of the virtues espoused by Paul when he talks of the fruit of the Spirit, "Love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control." Of those eight, I have problems with seven on an almost daily basis, but patience is by far my greatest difficulty.

I ran upon this quote by Santayana and it struck me. I recently had the displeasure of seeing an employee of my company self destruct, and I think Santayana's insight is quite applicable to that situation. I find a lot of people really do prefer unhappiness and drama. There have been people in my life over the last few weeks who are utterly miserable, and they are so because they want to be so. It's easy for me to fall into this trap too, because of my lack of patience. I'm impatient with so many things in my life.

Yet at the same time, patience is not a panacea, and frequently can merely be dressed up complacence. Thomas Edison, in fact, notes that "Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress." Patience, then, is not so much a contentedness with the way things are, but an acceptance that they will not instantly be as one desires. Consequently, the ideal environment for progress is one that balances discontent with the status quo with an understanding that there is a trail that must first be traversed before the finish line is reached.

There is a great danger, in the patience-pushers, that they are not properly motivated enough to change things that really aren't working. This could either be because they do not recognize that what they are doing isn't working, they ignore that fact, or they are just resigned to thinking that nothing can be done about it.

In the philosophical discipline, especially within the context of the field called "Practical Reason," two of the models of decision making are "utility maximizing" and "utility satisficing," where the latter represents those people who take things as being "good enough" rather than "optimal." There are many times and ways that we are benefited by going with what is "good enough." Choosing a toothbrush, picking something to eat, deciding on what to wear, etc. are times in which making the effort to maximize utility might be unnecessary.

But when it comes to important facets of life: spiritual issues, relationships, and career matters, it is imperative to maximize our utility, push the envelope, challenge ourselves, and in a sense "living beyond our means." Only when we actively step outside of our comfort zones will we ever grow, expand, and learn.

So few people are willing to live outside of their comfort zones, and so they will have intermittent spurts of progress. It is not that these people, ipso facto, cannot be or are not happy, for they certainly can be. In fact, people can be happy without ever experiencing progress. But happiness is not a light switch. It is not an on-off button. There are divergent gradations of happiness, and those higher gradations can only be achieved through the difficulties that accompany progress.

Perhaps this whole notion can be summed up with the last stanza of Longfellow's poem "A Psalm of Life,"

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate,
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor, and to wait.