The idea that we might have to wait for something, develop it, foster it, then, see it take root and grow seems out of place in our instant Web 2.0 world.

In a world of instant messaging and smart-phones, patience seems an anachronism. From our roots in an agrarian society, which, by its very nature, required patience, we have transformed into a society where any delay is unexpected and, candidly, an affront. 

We no longer have to wait until Spring for spring vegetables.  From our phone we can search, order and track the delivery of whatever we seek.   We can snap a picture of a barcode and check prices in hundreds of stores.  Why go to the library to research a question; we can Google-it.  With instant and incessant contact with our network of friends, we expect that we’ll get an answer to our queries… faster and faster.

This instant society has a lot to be said for it:  Data and opinions are at our finger-tips, 24/7.  Yet, perhaps because the very fabric of our society is now primed for “instant everything”, it appears that some essential understanding of the speed of life has been disrupted.

In our practice, we find many young people are discouraged by their lack of progress in corporate hierarchies right after college or grad school.  They tell us that they expected to be further along, to not be burdened by menial tasks and trivial pursuits.  We often refer to this as the “instant-corporate-president syndrome”.  There is a basic fundamental miscalculation about how fast life happens.

While our heads insist that it is perfectly logical that we should expect instant gratification, information, access, and success… life itself works on a different timetable from the speed of information. 

Moreover, data alone is insufficient to resolve many of life’s most important and challenging questions.  Who and if we will marry, which career path we should follow, what lifestyle will allow us to thrive, how to get unstuck from patterns that appear to diminish the quality of our life… these are all big questions that are not easy to resolve instantly with data alone. 

It turns out that our bodies mature and age at a given rate, and our emotional maturity develops over time and through many experiences.  Even our body rhythms do not change instantly; jet lag and the physical disruption of Daylight Savings Time are reminders of how long it takes our body to adjust to changes which our mind insists should require no time at all.

Not surprisingly, our habits don’t change quickly.  Our deep patterns do not “turn on a dime”, changing at the whim of a thought.  If we could “change” our patterning by the mere knowledge of our habits and a simple “decision”, there would be no issues with eating right, getting enough exercise, sufficient sleep, with having our work done on time or the many other issues which plague us.  We’d just decide and do it.

This disconnect, between thinking a thing and having it happen, gets us in a lot of trouble.  We expect instant change and judge ourselves harshly when it doesn’t happen immediately.

The truth is that it took a long time for our patterns of behavior and belief to form, bolstered by repetition and reinforcement.  To start something new, even an alteration in pattern as small as flossing our teeth nightly, is a change that must be repeated many times to gain a foothold in our automatic daily approach to life. 

We have to do it and do it and do it, many, many times, risking each time a failure.  And, when we fail, we must put it on the line again if we wish to make a change and again, do it and do it and do it.  In other words, we must be patient and determined for change to happen.  We are, after all, unseating deep habits that have been done over and over again many times with something new. 

While we often tout our ability to “change”, deep change requires a patience and determination which is uncomfortable and unfamiliar. 

By working with our body over time, deeper change can happen.  In taking this approach, we must scrap our expectation of instant success, ask our judge to take a rest, continually risk failure, and appreciate our small victories… unusual qualities in an instant world.

Living at the speed of life means that we will have to wait (either patiently or impatiently… our choice) for things (including us) to mature.  We can either gripe about the lengthy cultivation process that is required for us to move to the next stage of life or we can throw down the rake and stomp off or we can dig in.