“Everything comes in time to those who can wait.” I thought this was a French proverb, but I have seen it attributed to Rabelais. Maybe it’s just a proverb Rabelais quoted. Like Cervantes, Rabelais knew his proverbs.

Whatever its origin, its purport is clear enough. It’s a pitch for patience, which is a virtue I doubt any of us is born with. If the behavior of babies is any evidence, our wish to have what we want when we want it comes naturally to us.

Politicians in particular are given to exploiting this lamentable weakness. One might even say that such is what they do, period. As H.L. Mencken inimitably observed of the breed:

They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money that no one will have to earn.

In Americans the tendency is acute. As I have suggested before, the reason why there are no second acts in American lives (as Scott Fitzgerald memorably put it) is because Americans want to cram the whole of their lives into Act I. We not only want what we want when we want it; we want all of it immediately.

This desire for instant gratification is, of course, out of sync with reality. The seeds you plant in your garden in springtime are going to sprout in their own good time. No point in watching the plant too closely, either. It will blossom when it blossoms.

Patience happens to be the only virtue I have managed to make any progress toward in my life. I am much better now at taking my time and letting things happen as they will than when I was young. This has much to do with having worked for a newspaper for nearly three decades. Like the prospect of hanging, the prospect of a deadline wonderfully focuses the mind. Being anxious is a waste of energy.

Nevertheless, I still have to remind myself from time to time to take pleasure in what I am doing as I am doing it and not shift my attention to simply getting it done or, worse, to whatever else I may have to do. Actually, now that I think about it, I realize that patience really is largely about time management.

I realize also that, since I retired, I have proved less adept at time management than when I was working. Not having to go to work every day gives one the illusion that one has all sorts of free time — except there are all these things one feels obliged to do, which in turn compete with all the things one would like to do, or had hoped to do when one had the time, which should be right about now.

That is why I recently pulled back a bit from a lot of things I had been doing, especially blogging, which had begun to take up more time than I thought it warranted and was keeping me from doing some other things I very much wanted to do. I needed, I felt, some perspective in order to get a better idea of what I wanted my priorities to be.

To a certain extent what this meant was goofing off a bit. Last week, my wife and I spent a day just strolling about Old City, stopping into art galleries, spending some time at The Book Trader, and having dinner at a nice little Turkish restaurant called Konak. I have been reading books just because I wanted to, and ignoring others I ought to be reading for one reason or another. I feel certain that if I don’t try too hard things will fall into place on their own.

The fact is, whether you know how to wait or not, if you hang around long enough in life, you will grow old, by which time you will have learned some things about yourself you probably never suspected. One of those is how often you have to start over.

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

• An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
• Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
• To see like a child - June 26, 2013
• Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
• Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012

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