And I want it NOW!

Patience is a virtue that I don't consider myself to have in abundance...or at all.  That being said, I'm blaming cultural and societal factors for this.  (Surely it can't be my very own fault!  Personal accountability?  HA!  I laugh in the face of personal accountability!)

I've been alive for twenty-six years now.  Not a long time in the grand scheme of life expectancies, but long enough to see dramatic changes in the way the world works. 

Remember back in elementary school when they taught us how to use a card catalog to look up a book of interest?  We'd see if they had the card, find the call number, walk to the shelf, and see if the book was there.  It might have taken 5 minutes per book.  Now, I can type the name of any book from any location...my office, my bedroom, in line at the grocery store on my phone...and with an instantaneous click determine whether a library has a book, if it's checked out, whether its in the process of being re-shelved, and I can even tell them to hold it for me.  Or, I can download it to my Kindle and skip the process of looking for and reading an antiquated "book" altogether.

Then there are the cell phones, which probably play more heavily into our lack of societal patience than anything else.  We all carry cell phones (and if you're one of the holdouts, props to you...for real).  It's to the point that we get stressed out if we're without them.  We turn around and go back home if we forget them on the way to work.  We work ourselves into a panic attack if the battery is dying and we're without a charger.  You see people talking on them constantly.  Shoot, even on the way to work in the morning, or dropping the kids off at school, I see people talking on them.  Who is awake that early in the morning and what are they talking about?  And here's the real question:  is it *that* urgent that you couldn't wait the 5 minutes until you'll be in the office to say it to your coworker/boss's face?  Or wait the 10 minutes until you'll be home to tell your husband who you saw from across the Kroger parking lot?  Imagine if we all only had landline phones!  Or, even worse, had to rely on the US Postal Service (which probably *used* to be faster/more reliable in the "olden" days than it is now).  Not only would we be more patient, but it would be a nice exercise for our cultural attention-deficit disorder.  It's not too often we commit things to memory anymore...

Writing paper checks takes too long, now we use debit cards. Or we buy things online, and skip the whole process of going to the store altogether.

When dial-up wasn't fast enough we got cable.  When email wasn't fast enough we got instant messenger.  When VCRs weren't good enough, we got DVDs, and now DVRs.  We don't have to watch commercials anymore.  My kids don't understand the concept of live television.  "Mommy, can you fast forward the commercials?"

We live in an instantaneous and yet, somehow, still impatient world.  We are not satisfied, despite the fact that life happens faster now than ever.

Our culture breeds impatience.  And now our children don't know how to wait.  For anything.  (Or work for anything, but that's an entirely different blog for another day!)  I don't have patience myself, so how can I expect my children to?  This is a huge struggle for me.  It's Me vs. Society.  And my kids only know my example. 

This is not going to be an overnight transition for me, but I truly desire to become the opposite of what I am now...which is to say that I am an impatient, get-er-done, flying through life's little moments woman.  My prayer is that I can teach my children the virtue of patience by example.  We wait for good things.  We wait for four years (or more) to get our college diploma.  We wait as long as it takes to find our soulmate.  We wait for nine months to hold a new baby.  It behooves us to wait.  Waiting makes us stronger, better. 

And starting....now!...I will wait for patience.