I’ve never been particularly great at being patient. And I’ve always been made up spiritually as a contradictory mixture of lazy and hardworking. This is quite human, really, as most of us on some level are created of inner opposites, contradictions, good and bad, up and down, light and dark, loving and cruel, etc.
Time has historically felt to me largely like some unfair burden. But time, of course, shifts like deepening shafts of light moving from afternoon to evening. When you’re working hard and staying busy—or when you’re on a road trip and having fun—time passes quickly; it sifts lazily and deftly through your hands, the sand soft and cool as shadow.
But when things are not busy and not much is going on—when you are in effect “in your head”—it feels like you’re in some kind of inner prison. The easiest and most obvious example which now feels globally universal: The Pandemic. Think back to spring, 2020. Where were you? I was in the worst place of all: New York City. And not just New York City, but East Harlem. (Worse because it became incredibly violent.)
I remember vividly—viscerally—how time suddenly slowed down to a nasty, confusing Army crawl. The minutes felt like hours; the hours like days; the days like weeks; the weeks like months; the months like years. It was never going to end. No matter how many outside walks I went on (never feeling safe). No matter how many books I read (I finally tackled Anna Karenina and it changed my life). No matter how many online AA Zoom meetings. No matter how many three-hour-long phone chats with friends. Even running didn’t fully chase time back to its normal feeling. (I started running earnestly in September, 2020 and six months later ran a solo marathon, cutting out 28 miles in five hours all over the island of Manhattan.)
I kept telling myself—as so many of us around the globe did during that time—be patient; this time will come to an end. It will change. It has to. Change is the one absolute constant in life.
And, finally, it did “end,” even if we still have outbreaks and new strains here and there.
I often feel “oppressed” by time. Like the Earth itself—that lovely bastard Mother Nature—time pulls no punches. Time does not concern itself with your emotions, your drives, your ambitions, your fears. You can’t anthropomorphize time, because time is a human-created social construct. There is no inherent “time” in organic nature; there is only natural growth, evolution, devolution, change. But we needed some sort of system of thought wherein we could comprehend this constant change, so that we could somehow manage, using math, to measure our lives, give meaning to our existence as organic beings who are born, live, decay and eventually die.
Time, I sometimes, think, is a “rapist” of sorts. No matter what happens in your life, no matter what you want, don’t want, do or don’t do: Time carries on. Millions died around the world during Covid. Time remained silent and kept going. My father became sick with cancer, grew worse, died at 77. Time pushed on, not even glancing over its shoulder. There is no time and yet time, our creation, is relentless. It both is and is not. Just like the human notion of race. There is no race, really; as most of us have now come to realize, race is a social construct. And yet we act—especially progressives—ironically as if the only thing genuinely real in America is race. Again, those pesky contradictions.
Over time I have learned some patience. Certainly more patience than I ever possessed before. For me it’s all about acquiring, slowly, the talent of being Here Now, in this precise moment, allowing this exact day to do it’s thing. And when I have a terrible day—as I did a few days back, for instance—I know in my inner self that this is okay, because, as my mother always used to posit: Tomorrow is yet another new day, a fresh wide-open road, a new opportunity. For a long time I didn’t believe that idea; I felt, basically, as if each single day needed to be fully engaged with, fought against, controlled to the highest extent possible.
Much of the above was based, of course, on youth, inexperience, and the drive for power, the ability (or hope) to manipulate the course of my life. But as the years have passed, and I pushed through my twenties and thirties, entering triumphantly into my forties—a golden age I never thought I’d survive to—I have come to understand that life isn’t something you control; it’s something you allow to unfurl and you do your best to survive along the way.
Control is a funny thing, and I can’t help contemplating time and patience when I consider it. We humans—weak, childlike, ego-driven as we are—like to think we can control our lives, choose our destinies. But of course we can’t. We all know that deep down. The deepest thing we try to control is death. We attempt this control psychologically, through the use of denial, distraction, numbing out, the attainment of power, etc. (Read my essay on death and control here.)
But the truth is there is no control. First consider the individual. Did you choose to be born? Did you choose what kind of family you were born into? (Race, family disease, history, psychological issues, height, weight, biological sex, etc.) We know that between genetics and childhood environment a great majority of human behavior is explained. That’s not to suggest that we have no free will, no individual agency…but probably we have a lot less of this than most of us want to admit.
Then you zoom the microscope out to 30,000 feet and you start seeing great historical forces at play, based on geography, closeness or lack thereof to water, climate, culture, the clashes of different kinds of societies, etc. All of these forces are out of your hands. How many times has someone said to you, You’re just like your father? You’re just like your sister? That’s because people notice the similarities, physical, personality, speech, actions, and more.
And into this stew of complex reality people pretend they actually have control over their lives, that they can some shape their destiny, their future. But how often do people actually achieve what they think they want? And I say ‘think’ they want because so often we come to realize along the road that the thing we thought all this time we wanted would actually be the very worst thing for us possible, and we let go and become open and willing to accept whatever life brings us.
In AA there’s a saying: Let go and let god. “God,” in this case, for me, is not Jesus Christ or any historical-religious being, but rather a vague, abstract spiritual idea congruent with: The Universe; The Grand Mystery; Open Black Space; Eternity; The Void; etc. Whatever we don’t fully comprehend as humans; let’s call that God.
Over the years I have come ultimately to respect time. Because it does its thing no matter what you or I think. It’s sort of—and forgive the analogy—like the monster who never quits, Donald J. Trump. No matter what they throw at the man—and even when a kid tries to kill the former president—Trump, in all his wild and complicated glory, marches on, like the Energizer Bunny. You gotta hand it to the guy. (And let’s face it: Like him or hate him [I hate him], he looked like a badass Political Rambo after the attempted assassination, fist jutting into the air, demon-scowl on his face, blood streaked across his ear and cheek.)
But I digress.
Time and patience.
Time does it’s thing, marches to the beat of its own hardcore drum. (As my father once said to a friend of mine about me.) It does not stop, nor care, nor think; it’s like a soldier in war, fighting to the end. Perhaps as they say in roughly four billion years the sun will explode and the Earth will shatter and melt into obscurity and nothingness. But even that will not destroy time. Because space, the universe will carry on; Earth is but one tiny planet, a planet amongst a billion galaxies. And so our human construct of “time” will theoretically keep going.
Patience is powerful precisely because the truth is that things come when they come, not when we want them to come. Life moves according to its own natural rhythm, not according to our petty wants and needs. Days come and days go; seasons arrive and move away; the earth spins, whirls around the sun, and the moon around the earth. We’re born, we live, we grow old, we die. Beginning, middle and end. Most of us live our lives as if we’re trying to get somewhere. But where, pray tell, are we exactly trying to get? Success? Fame? Family?
We all reach the same terrible terminus: Death. No matter where you “arrive.” Time is linear to us; that’s how we created it. But really it’s four-dimensional. It’s not one plus two plus three; it’s simply it. Up, down, in, out, inner and outer, all at once.
Time is the cage in which the human condition exists; it is the soft prison surrounding us. We can never get out of that cage; the bars are made of shadow and yet we cannot escape our human condition, the condition of emotion and change and decay and death.
This isn’t bad, it just is. The only question, really, is: Will you swim upstream, against the current, or will you let go, allow your arms to be loose, and allow your body to be lazily carried down the river that is called inevitability.
This is where time and patience live.
This is where heroism lies.
This is what being human can be.