Avoiding the memory anchor that every personal question makes us drop in the exclusive deep sea of what is being asked—which makes us forget that that are more seas, with other storms, and other lulls, that we endured or are yet to witness, or to experience—I put the question in a small boat and patiently kept an eye on it to see how it fared on different times of the day during a few days, which currents took it and to where.
I can tell you this: at night, Patience sleeps soundly and quietly. And we’ve to wait for it to wake up to continue with our observations, to further update our log.
From the Talmud to Nietzsche—and I can’t think of better opposites here: the hot blooded Hebrews and the cold headed German—patience comes out as a virtue. But it is also a word. In such quality, is it one those that have a translation in the de facto world?
For the patient reader who navigated through all those marine images above and is now reading this, a reward: those images had a reason, as the first example comes from the sea.
The female anglerfish, at the floor of one of our seas, patiently waits for her lured prey to come close enough to suck it into her stomach. That requires a seemingly substantial amount of patience, and also a tolerant disposition to eat what the sea brings. It requires immobility too. Then a more active male anglerfish will eventually find her, bite his way into her, his body will dissolve into hers, leaving behind but a pair of gonads—bags of semen. And she can collect many pairs from various males. So there’s some lesson here: patience and pain, at least the ability to withstand the latter, seem to walk hand in hand, or at least swim fin on fin. As Aristotle put it, “Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet.” Or salty, depending on how we cook our anglerfish.
The more active predator is blessed with choice. And which better predator to teach us that than us humans? Supposedly our ancestors were weak and had to resort to tools to hunt down larger preys, which in turn would feed more properly the group that was needed to hunt those same preys. Yet their spears, as one example, were unlikely to kill instantly a large animal. Enters Patience: the patience to follow the wounded animal's tracks until it laid down, bleeding to death.
What lessons can we learn from this couple of examples? That patient ones might be just waiting to eat you alive or to injure you to death. It might be no coincidence that the word patience is also related to suffering.
That’s maybe why the late Christopher Hitchens’ take on the subject of patience is the most dear to my still beating heart:
“Your least favourite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
