Perserverance > Patience

As children, we are told to wait. Be patient. Be quiet. Be timely.

 But what is waiting? What are we waiting for?

As a child, time is such an abstract concept. It's the ticking hands of a clock, but, what are we ticking towards? What direction is time flowing? Where are we going exactly?

As an adult, time becomes more concrete; as it dictates the flow of our livelihoods and life experiences. 

The clock keeps us on time for:

 work; 

it tells us when to eat; 

when to sleep; 

when to fuck; 

when to fuck off;  

when to die.

When we are told to cultivate patience, its the aftereffect of getting good at waiting. The act of waiting, or perhaps, being able to envision a horizon in the distance that we will eventually meet, is what we are trying to aim for. We are told to not be or do or think about what we may be, even though imagining ourselves in a distance place, is the only way we can truly change our lives. Patience is inertness. Patience is sitting in acceptance and perhaps even resentment, that the thing you want is just over the next hill. Maybe if you are lucky, you'll find it eventually, before you die.

Patience is finicky because it requires us to accept time as a linear and consistent entity.  But time is not consistent--at least--not our perceptions of it. Yes, the hands on the atomic clock click at the same rate, yet, we as humans experience time in funky and incongruent ways.

When we spend time doing the things we love, and being with the people we deeply care about, time is almost irrelevant, or even, ceases to exist entirely. We slip into a stream of conscious experience and  connection that we forget that we are temporal beings. We suddenly become present. And truly, presence is the only moment that truly exists. Everything else outside of the this exact moment is an echo, or an imagining. 

Surfing in the flow of experience, rather than being held hostage by linearity, is how we can defy time. We ride the ebb and crest of the wave as each moment rises and falls and slips back into the greater swelling of experience. Time is not a dimension, as much as it is an emergent property of our experience of physical movement, thought, and projection.

Our human experience is not truly sequential. The past, while it exists in our memory, is not quite an event preceding the next one, as it lives in our minds concurrently. Similarly, the future, which is a potentiality or a speculation, is not entirely solid either. So what is each moment, then, if not the proverbial inhale and exhale between what you think, and what you do.

This comes back to the title of this post--perseverance is better than patience. While patience tells us to wait, to pause, to reflect and meditate and sit still (which has its merits), perseverance tells us to persist--to continue onward even when things are hard. To not become stifled, to not dally too long in one place or upon one thought. Perseverance wants us to rage against time. It wants us to not just wade in tide and stand against the waves; we are meant to surf the fucking biggest waves we can catch.