Patience is a Virtue

Claim: Patience is a virtue.

By “virtue,” I mean that character trait which gives one more power and freedom to attain some goal which directly contributes to the flourishing human life. I do not mean that which is loved by God or any other entity. Virtue is useful.

Patience comes in at least two distinct varieties, and these varieties are so distinct that it is accurate to say that they are not the same thing at all. They merely share a name.

First is the patience of waiting for a certain time period to end. This is perhaps what we normally mean when we use the term patience. For most of us, our first exercises of patience involve waiting for our parents to finish some task. For example, when my mother would take me grocery shopping and I needed to follow her without causing problems for about an hour. If I lost my patience, I would start whining or start running around the store. If I remained patient, I would remain quietly by my mother’s side and let her accomplish her task. But this is not necessarily a virtue. I may have been too tired or bribed into staying quiet, in which case I was merely following the path of least resistance. I may have been playing a game in my head, or perhaps on a handheld device, and kept myself distracted. This form of patience is demonstrated in the famous experiment where children must stop themselves from eating a marshmallow for a duration in order to get a second marshmallow, as in this video.  As an adult, we probably exercise patience most often in one of two ways. First, while we are waiting in lines at a business. Second, when we are trying to deal with someone who is stubborn or angry.

However, these forms of patience are of a different sort than the one I would like to discuss briefly here. This second form of patience has to do with keeping one’s mind free of distractions. It is perhaps only important when one is trying use one’s mind on an important task that does not compel one’s emotions.  In this form of patience, one must keep one’s mind concentrated on a single thing without the advantage of emotional compulsion.  In these situations, numerous other thoughts are likely to intrude upon one consciousness, and if the drives pull one away from the intended subject, then one will not be able to do the necessary mental work to accomplish the intended task.  I am tempted to call this form the “internal patience,” but I don’t want to be so hasty as to assume there are no external components to this patience or no internal components to the former sort. Therefore, I will call this “Patience-B,” and the earlier sort “patience-a.”

It is related to “focus” but there is a subtle difference.  In many activities in which I sit for extended periods of time and keep my mind occupied, my mind is emotionally compelled toward thinking about a subject. There is no struggle to stay on task. Indeed, “focus” in this sense is just a benign form of obsession. The emotional drive is in harmony with the intended goal that is determined by one’s rationally determined goals.

The difference between the “Patience B” and “focus” is the harmony or disharmony of one’s emotional drives and one’s rationally determined goals. But one cannot usually “will” their emotions to align with their goals, and so “focus” is not a matter of one’s free will. Focus is a more stable mental stance than Patience B, but we cannot simply choose which stance to be in. Therefore, to get the most out of one’s mental potential, it is necessary to develop strategies for dealing with Patience B.
With many mental tasks, once Patience B has been exercised sufficiently, the subject matter becomes more interesting and compelling as one gains mastery of it. A habit is developed, and the emotional drive associated with the subject becomes a stronger and more compelling drive. After some time, then, the texture of drives gradually turns from Patience B to focus.

If I have accurately described Patience B, then the challenge is to keep one weak emotional drive as the strongest emotional drive present in one’s mind. There are then two basic strategies: increase the strength of the designated weak drive, or decrease/remove the strength of the non-designated drives. Likely, a successful strategy will involve a combination of the two basic strategies. If you are reading this, I would be interested in knowing what sorts of strategies are possibly effective.