January 25th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Yoda: “I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.”
Obi-Wan: “He will learn patience.”
Me: “Obi-Wan, you’d better be right, because my impatience is slowly creeping toward the far end of the spectrum.”

Just one of the many problems that Generations X-onward have had to contend with is that we’ve never had to wait for anything. Ever. That doesn’t sound like a problem, I know, but it means that we’ve been gifted with an extremely stunted sense of proportion. In the days before cell phones, if you wanted to talk to someone you had to wait until they were at home to call. No instant messaging, no texting, no emails. Before downloading, you had to wait until something was available to the mass market before you could listen to/watch/read it—assuming you could find a store in your area that carried it. If you wanted to buy a house, you saved for a down-payment and talked to a loan officer at the bank.

Things have changed. Now we live in an age of immediate wish fulfillment. You want to talk to your friend? If they’re even slightly plugged-in, you can probably have everything but their precise GPS location at a moment’s notice—and maybe that too. Looking for that new album/movie/book? It’s as close as minutes, even seconds away online—less time than it would take to put on your shoes and coat if you were going to look for it in stores. And, up until recently in the States, you could write your own references for a mortgage with no money down. Why wait for anything? The world never stops rotating, and your life shouldn’t be dependent on things like the rising and setting of the sun. We’ve beaten the system; the rules no longer apply to us. In short, we want—and get—everything now.

I made a monumental life decision a few months back: to move out to the sticks and learn to garden and live naturally—so why don’t I get to do any of that immediately? I know I set a five year goal to own property, and it seemed reasonable at the time, but I want to be doing it now! What’s the hold-up?

Okay, I understand I can’t afford the property, but why can’t I go out and garden?! Oh yeah. The seasons. Right.

I learn skills primarily by doing. I love to read, but if I’m learning something physical I need some hands-on experience. And consequently, if I want to learn how to, say, garden, I have to get out there and work the soil myself. If I’m not doing that—if I’m just reading about gardening, I feel in some regards like I’m not doing anything at all. It’s not the most reasonable perspective—there’s a hell of a lot of information out there that I could be assimilating and keeping on file—but having chosen my new path, I want to set it into motion. It’s more than a little unfortunate on the timing front, though, what with planting season still another few months off. Still, I’m trying to set the prejudices of a generation and deal with the fact I’m not going to be learning much horticulture until the spring.

Which brings us back to patience. The world doesn’t stop spinning, but it does rotate on an annual clock and my constantly stimulated North American, 21st Century, ‘Net savvy self is going to have to get used to the cycles of the year again, because when I plant my first crop (wherever that may be, I don’t have a yard at the moment), I’ll have to wait for the plants to sprout, then grow, then ripen. And if I haven’t shored up my expectations by that point, there’s going to be a rude awakening—one I’m sure I’ll end up texting you about.