Finding Balance Between Patience and Action
Rye bread can take more than a day to yeast properly before it can be baked. Interrupt the process any earlier and chances are you will end up with a mediocre loaf that’s not nearly as good as you expected. This is why we initially tend to follow the recipe step by step — we know that if we complete the necessary phases correctly we will be rewarded with a tasty loaf of fresh bread. It is not hard to be patient when you know exactly how long you have to wait for and the consequences of waiting. But what do we do when there is no recipe?
It is deep embedded in the human nature to want things to be good instantly. Patience is something that evolution has brought along only lately as civilizations emerged and the human brain developed. The part of the brain that is responsible for willpower and silencing of impulses is exactly the part that has evolved most recently, and it still needs lots of optimisation. Most people follow their instincts more than they would claim they do on a daily basis, and thus there are only a few individuals who have mastered true patience. We might be looking back at ancient Greeks or the people of Mesopotamia, and thinking that their brains must have been much worse at controlling impulses than ours. I mean, after all, some of them lived more than 10 000 years ago, right? However, through an evolutionary lense no significant change in the core functions and behaviours of the brain could have occured during such a short time span. What has changed throughout the years is instead the domains towards which our impulses get directed.
For many years impulses were the ones to save us from extinction in critical moments, but with the rise of ancient civilizations many of these had to be adapted for a life that addresses survival from another point of view. If during the earlier days you didn’t get eaten by a bear and had avoided meeting another hungry caveman so that your copies of genes could be passed on before noon, your impulses had done exactly what they were meant to do. With time things got more complicated. Fights turned into organized warfare, women were no longer as easily accessible and the cozy city life made room for new sicknesses to arise. Both concrete and abstract. Impulses had no choice but to adapt, some of them had to be inhibited and thus patience evolved in a much clearer form than before. As civilisatory wonders emerged, being patient became increasingly important to be able to follow up on actually executing certain ideas. And here we arrive at the crossroads between two types of impulses: the rational and the emotive ones.
The ancient people directed all of their patience in the rational direction, while their emotive impulses most likely still remained at less controled levels. Mesmerizing artworks, architectual masterpieces, scientific discoveries — all of these show how the impulses were being controlled in the pursuit of rational goals. Lack of control over the emotive impulses, however, allowed for occassional praising of Dionysus and incredibly advanced understanding of different kinds of love and relations between humans. Thus we can conclude that rational impulses are more related to bringing certain tasks to their end, while emotive impulses are related to our feelings and our impulsive reactions in relation to another human being, on a level that is more natural and less manifactured by the society and its ideals. It is the wish to hit somebody, it is the wish to reproduce, it is the wish to cry, to insult, to comfort, to provide. The rational is the wish to finish, to complete, to reach a goal, to prove something either to yourself or others, to test your limits. In a sense, one could consider the rational impulses as more masculine and the emotive impulses as more feminine. The balance between these two categories has shifted throughout the years, back and forth, and the manifestations of this have been reflected in the society. Looking at our generation it is clear that some of us share the inhibition of rational impulses with the humans that lived more than 2000 years ago, and that our control of emotive impulses has only gotten more advanced as well. So where do our weaknesses lie? And do impulses always need to be controlled?
A problem most of us can agree on is that we live in a society which constantly tries to speed-up the gratification of the average man’s wishes. This implies that our impulses are being identified and then used strategically for building businesses, brainwashing the gray masses, and unavoidably simply degrading our level of patience as such. At the same time we are constantly lured into trying to work against this phenomena, by praising patience, praising hard work and the ability to control ourselves. We think that this is what makes a truly civilized human being. Bookstores are filled with self-help books that are supposed to help us take control of our lives, in schools teachers are telling their students that fighting is wrong, swearing is wrong, expressing too many emotions is wrong. This calls for a division of the society. A division betweeen people who are able to follow up on these trends and are then seen as strong and superior, and the ones that don’t have this capability and thus remain seen as weak and sometimes even worthless. We rarely stop to consider the reflection of our masculine and feminine nature within these two sides.
To be constantly striving for a goal is a very masculine thing to do, and it is linked to our rational impulses. There is an undeniable correlation between women slowly becoming more masculine and gaining more powerful positions in the society. Nowadays we tend to value masculinity so high that we forget our feminine nature, which is exactly what most people who lack patience and the ability to rise up to the standards of our modern society most likely possess. Their core values include relationships and emotions more than the individual pursuit of a goal. In reality, the issue is not that the West is ruled by masculinity and some people cannot live up to it, but instead the fact that we both as individuals and as a society fail to recognize this feminine part of ourselves. The feminine doesn’t even want to be in charge. It does not want to be given too many rules or rational paths to follow, but neither does it mean that it is weak. Due to our wish to masculinize everything, we extinguish this femininity before it has a chance to fully bloom, and this is where “the weak” come from. Strength comes from knowing yourself and embracing your best qualities, but how can you embrace something you aren’t even aware of?
Before discussing the control of impulses further it can be valuable to consider the actual definition of patience. As we have established so far, patience is essentially the inhibitory process of an impulse. This process can be seen in relation to two categories of impulses, rational and emotive, that emerge within us. We tend to associate patience with waiting without action, however, patience can just as well be choosing which things to act on and acting on those. Refining your own values in the moment. It can even be acting itself, but with the initial inhibition of an impulse in order to recognise it and be aware of it, as opposed to acting while being unknowing. This means that patience can be found within action; but does it still have to arise from non-action? No. Patience can just as well form out of action, because it does not possess clear beginnings or ends. It is a never-ending circle, and that is why it requires balance in order to continue spinning as it should. Finding balance between patience and action is essential for any kind of success, but we tend to think that balance has to be found between opposites. But patience and action aren’t opposites. They are synonyms, they are allies. At first, it is tough to grasp how similar they are, and thus it’s easier to imagine them as two separate things that require balance, instead of seeing them for what they truly are: a whole. Patience is no longer just the result of inhibiting thousands of impulses, just as action is no longer just letting go. Having estimated the nature of patience it is easier to assess whether we at all should strive for control over all of our impulses.
Order in chaos is the inherent way of the universe, and by desperately trying to control everything we only end up disrupting the balance and causing more chaos. Our world is not meant to be organized and sterile. Instead we should simply learn how to handle the chaos and use it to our advantage, and for this to be possible we have to be aware of the different types of impulses. Problems often arise when we try to deal with our emotive impulses emotionally and with our rational impulses rationally. We often manage to not give in to our emotive impulses, but then end up trying to analyse them emotionally as opposed to adding some sort of rationality for equilibrium. When dealing with impulses attached to our rational side of being it’s vice versa — we risk falling into the trap of rationalizing completely everything and thus trying to control too much.
Finally we arive at the core question: how do we maintain balance within patience in situations when the result or the aim is unknown? Most of the time it is possible to consciously analyse what outcome our patience will encourage or prevent, which allows us to control(read: to know when to inhibit an impulse and when to surrender to it) our impulses more easily. However, there are moments when we seemingly have to be patient for no reason or at least for nothing that directly relates to us, and thus it can feel as if being patient is a waste of time. We are ready to give in and give up much more easily. This also occurs in situations when we do have an understanding of the outcome, but our own vision is not strong enough. In general, rational impulses can be controled rather effortlessly as long as the goal remains steady and clear, whereas emotive impulses take help from rationalization. Not in the sense of imprisoning emotions, but rather, more often than not, surrendering to the emotive impulses, yet not forgetting to time by time analyse them in order to understand their origin and be more aware the next time they arise.
Ultimately the easiest way towards restoring balance between patience and action is by creating your own vigorous visions of the outcome. We fall into the extremes of giving in to some of our impulses and controlling others too much, and on top of that — we do it all for someone else’s vision. To find our own little purposes would benefit us as individuals and our common society the most. To be aware of our impulses. To be aware of ourselves. Then and only then will there be true balance in patience and in us.
