I have no patience.
My constant battle with my passions and the time it takes to fulfill them.
This past year I put a lot of focus and effort into living a “slow life.” I may not be the girl on TikTok dressed in flowery dresses, reading books under a tree, making sourdough bread in her cottage-core kitchen. But I am that tattooed lady in a ripped Pantera shirt and the house-Crocs that are 4x bigger than her feet tramping around her garden looking at bees. I am that person who lost their phone in the house somewhere and is on the deck swing with a book, getting distracted watching, you guessed it, more bees.
I watch a lot of bees. You can learn a lot from them.
I took up gardening again for this reason; gardening has always taught me to slow down. So much about it takes time. Growing seedlings. Flowers blooming. Vegetables growing. Even the building of a garden; the shoveling of dirt, the planning, the digging, the mistakes. It all takes time.
Every day I go out in my garden and just look at everything. Some days it looks like nothing changed. The next day, the beans started climbing on their poll. The lettuce has more leaves. The dill finally acclimated and the strawberry blossoms are coming in.
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The other day I watched this silly fat bumblebee try to get over my garden fence. (The fence is 4 foot high netting.) It took such a long time. He finally got it. I watched the whole thing. But he was so determined and so…patient.
I have even less patience with writing. I started The One-Horned Heretic in 2020, but back then it was just a short story. The next year I got cracking on it as a novel, and from 2022 to now it went through four drafts. To me and my lizard brain, I think that’s “too much time.” In reality, given all the drafts I did, I basically wrote four books in two years.
I think a lot about where this impatience comes from. I have always been impatient in an eager way. I get excited, I get determined. I want to see what happens next. I want to get to the point I’ve been working towards. But I also think it has a lot to do with our warper perception of time now from the internet.
Recently I read Do Nothing: How To Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. In it, Celeste Headlee speaks to this warped perception of time:
“But the speed of our devices quickly began to change our understanding of time in the non-digital world. How long do you wait after sending a text, for example, before you become impatient for a response?”
I’ve thought about this ever since. Everything is so instant. Communication. Shopping. Entertainment. It’s all at our fingertips and scrolling by in 3-second intervals.
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This coupled with the constant comparison game I know we all play lowers that patience threshold even more. I see R.F. Kuang publishing four books while also getting her Ph.D at Yale, soon to graduate. I see it as one final moment and not as a whole, including the four years in between of hard work plus everything not shown in each social media post.
I guess patience is more of a practice. There’s no magic pill to make it go away. There is no cure-all. You can’t reshuffle your stats like in Fallout and give yourself more patience. So you have to practice it, grow with it, and leave little reminders everywhere to remember.
Or the universe can leave them in the form of bees.
The universe is always trying to teach me lessons. One day I will learn.
I also wear the large crocs. Bees are so cool, but kinda scary to me. I watch spiders, they're slightly less intimidating. I don't know if that makes any sense. I love your perspective of writing four novels in two years. Very true. I'm trying to appreciate the journey more than the destination.