Power of Patience How to Slow the Rush and Enjoy More Happiness, Success, and Peace of Mind Every Day

1. HOW THIS OLD-FASHIONED VIRTUE CAN IMPROVE YOUR LIFE Dear God, I pray for patience. And I want it RIGHT NOW! -Oren Arnold Consider this: * Some McDonald's are promising lunch in ninety seconds or it's free. * The average doctor visit now lasts eight minutes. * An over-the-counter drug is marketed for women who "don't have time for a yeast infection." * Politicians currently take a mere 8.2 seconds to answer a question, regardless of the complexity of the topic. * A popular all-you-can-eat buffet in Tokyo charges by the minute--the faster you eat, the cheaper it is. * Kodak is launching one-hour film development shops at Disney World, in hotel lobbies, and in amusement parks so you can have your pictures before the vacation is over. * The head of Hitachi's portable computer division motivates his workers with the slogan: "Speed is God, and time is the devil." * Developers of high rises have discovered an upward limit to the number of floors--the amount of time people are willing to wait for elevators. Fifteen seconds is what feels best; if it stretches to forty, we freak out. All of us these days, it seems, spend our lives rushing around. We're in constant motion, and we expect everything and everyone around us to go faster as well. As technology watcher David Shenk notes, between our modems and our speed dials, faxes, beepers, and FedEx, "Quickness has disappeared from our culture. We now only experience degrees of slowness." Writer James Gleick says it more bluntly--we're all suffering from "hurry sickness," a term first coined by Meyer Friedman, the identifier of the Type A personality. I know I have it. I can't stand how slowly my computer boots up. I actually timed it recently; it took two minutes and I was fidgeting the whole time. I'm the person pushing the elevator button more than once to make it come faster. I hit the pound key to bypass the message on other people's voice mail. And I use the one-minute button on the microwave because it's quicker than punching in the time myself. This is how bad I've got it. Yesterday, I went to my local copy shop. I made my copies and was standing in line, waiting to pay. The young man behind the counter was struggling to help a very old lady figure out how to send a package to her grandchild. There's one other person in line in front of me. My inner monologue goes like this: Lines, I hate lines. Why can't they get enough help in here? (Fume.) Why can't they at least post how much they charge for copies so I could pay without waiting? (A minute passes. More fuming.) I don't have time for this. I've got more important things to do. I can't just stand here. I have to get home and write this book on patience. I can't take it anymore. I blurt out from my place in line, "How much for a copy?" "Ten cents," replies the flustered young man. Flinging down a dollar for my forty-cent purchase, I storm out of the store, the irony of the situation not occurring to me until I am driving away. Another word for hurry sickness is impatience, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one suffering from it. Road rage, violence of all sorts, blowups at the office, divorce, yelling at our kids . . . all of these and many other of the world's ills can be traced at least in part to a lack of patience. Recently the state of California has been running public service announcements to "slow for the cone zone." It's a campaign to get drivers to slow from sixty-five to fifty-five miles per hour in construction areas because so many workers have been killed. The ads inform listeners that the time difference between going fifty-five and sixty-five in a one-mile construction area is ten seconds. People are getting killed because we're not willing to get somewhere ten-seconds-a-mile later! Indeed it appears thatRyan, M. J. is the author of 'Power of Patience How to Slow the Rush and Enjoy More Happiness, Success, and Peace of Mind Every Day', published 2003 under ISBN 9780767914864 and ISBN 0767914864.