Printed in the Summer 2025 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Gay Levine, Arlene, "A Meditation on Impatience" Quest 113:3, pg 38-9
By Arlene Gay Levine
Time for me, time for you
Time for everything we do
Hurry and rush are such a waste
The magician is one who has never known haste.
Over many years, it gradually became clear to me that suffering served as a device to open my heart to love. Calling out in physical, mental, or emotional distress strengthened my faith muscle. When the moment was right, if I waited without expectation, more often than not my prayers would be answered. Perhaps not always in the time frame or the way I hoped, but occasionally even better than I imagined.
When I was younger, before that could happen, I remember deciding to give up something that I believed hindered my soul’s development. What would I actually fast from? A tsunami of thoughts flooding my mind prompted the creation of a complete list of issues that held me back from honoring the Beloved within. For what felt like hours (but was barely minutes), the task tortured me. Then an aha! moment crashed into my consciousness with an important insight: the impatience that plagued me since childhood would have to get the boot.
The saying “love is patient, love is kind” appears in the Bible in 1 Corinthians 13:4. The passage continues to list other characteristics of love: it does not envy, boast, or pride itself; it does not dishonor others; it is not self-seeking or easily angered; it does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth; and it always protects, trusts, hopes, and perseveres.
How, I wondered, could one possibly attain all these virtues quickly? Impatience is a fertile little minx; it spawns so many vices.
To be fair, I did have glimmers that these frequent refusals to complete one job before dashing off to the next was not serving me or anyone else around me. There were times when a frantic impulse caused me to give up on a task, bang into objects, get snappish, or burn the meal. It often alienated people I cared about, prevented living in the now, and kept me from honoring the desire to create a meaningful life. A compulsion to rush generated mayhem, while the angels watched in dismay.
One day, searching my mind for clues to solve this dilemma, a sudden urge to declutter arose. Most of my unwanted things were sequestered in the basement. “Yes,” I thought, “let me start there.” The first carton I looked in was loaded with very old books. My hand grasped a slim volume and opened to a poem by Eve Merriam, who had been one of America’s most respected poets for adults and children. Instantly changing gears from cleaning up, I began to read:
A Lazy Thought
There go the grownups
To the office,
To the store.
Subway rush,
Traffic crush;
Hurry, scurry,
Worry, flurry.No wonder
Grown-ups
Don’t grow up
Any more.
It takes a lot
Of slow
To grow.
There in the basement (or, as I realized later, my unconscious), an epiphany occurred: “It takes a lot of slow to grow.” If this Jungian moment was a teacher, what was it asking me to do? The answer seemed obvious. I would go up to my study, turn on the computer, and begin researching impatience and patience, the yin and yang of time management. The torment of hastiness had resulted in unresolved stress, anxiety, and anger from childhood.
I sat on my favorite chair and decided to probe deeper. After taking some full breaths, slowly letting go into the peace and quiet of the moment, I felt ready to ask myself to recall memories from childhood that aroused the urge to hurry.
Most of my recollections centered around my mother, a basically kind woman who did not know the meaning of “one task at a time.” Impatiently rushing me to do one thing or another, she trained me to be just like her. This memory made me recall how stressed, anxious, and angry I always felt when I was around her. No wonder I eagerly looked forward to going to school, getting outside to be alone in nature, or hiding in the bedroom with my head in a book. These enjoyable activities were life preservers in the choppy seas of childhood.
When I became an adult, it became essential for me to forgive myself and my mother. On my new path, I would stop encouraging a negative mindset implanted years ago lest it take over my life in the present. In this case, the solution was clear: I became an acolyte of patience. A simple technique that worked wonders was meditating on statements, often quotes I collected over time, to energize positive qualities I wished to manifest in my life. A particular favorite on the dichotomy between the vice of impatience and the virtue of patience is these wise thoughts from the painter Georgia O’Keeffe: “Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
Arlene Gay Levine is the author of 39 Ways to Open Your Heart: An Illuminated Meditation (Conari Press) and Movie Life (Finishing Line Press). Her prose and poetry have found a home in The New York Times, an off-Broadway show, anthologies, journals, radio programs, and online. Most recently her poems have appeared in Valley View Review, Bronze Bird Review, and Poets for Human Rights. The epigraph to this article is taken from her poem “Father Time’s Birthday Party,” Quest, winter 2010. http://www.arlenegaylevine.com/
Looking at Stars
Looking at stars through dark glasses
kills the view; it doesn’t mean
the stars aren’t sparkling in that pretty way
they have of winking you out from a crowd of billions
They know who you are even if you don’t yet
Impatience is sabotage, the weapon
you bludgeon yourself with so
you can’t escape the chains
only you can remove; hurrying to heal,
you won’t
Looking at stars
helps cure the inverted view
Quiet endurance over millenniums
speaks of the Spirit
steeping deep in the dark
as stars, implacable,
shine faith
into your wounded
eyes
Arlene Gay Levine