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I’ve never been a particularly patient person, but I’m getting worse. And frankly, I blame TV.
Specifically, I blame the X-Factors and the Bachelorettes and Strictly Come Dancings of the world. Just thinking about how much time humanity has lost to these televisual fidget-spinners which somehow manage to masquerade as entertainment makes my blood boil.
But you know what I hate most of all? It’s the pregnant pause, this infuriating affectation which has seeped into every corner of our entertainment culture. The “‘And the winner is…’ followed by a five-minute pause and tense music” approach to saying things, our growing inability to just for the love of god spit it out. To get to the point.
Instead, the information you want gets hidden behind endless fluff so that 2 minutes worth of entertainment can fill 45 minutes of airtime.
Spiritual practices have elements of this too, or at least many spiritual teachers and teachings do. There’s this fetishisation of the “process”, an implicit belief that the longer the journey takes the better it must be. If you aren’t lucky enough to have some kind of profound experience in the first few attempts, then you either soldier on blindly or fall by the wayside.
