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Read Letter

Patience

My dear Jack,

It is another Saturday and as is my custom, I’m going to share a life lesson or two with you. Today I want to share with you that most improbable of all values expected of a young man (or woman) – patience!

Patience is not a virtue young men and women are naturally prone to. The very outlook of the young abhors patience. It’s why they created technologies of impatience. Twitter, Facebook, email, instant digital photography and the like are technologies of impatience. These technologies compress space and time reducing them to the barest of minimals. And to that extent every young man and woman is a minimalist (of sorts).

Barely a decade ago, we relied on the post office and the postmaster for transmission of messages, including urgent ones. Now we call this “snail mail”. Overnight deliveries are now snail mail. Imagine! Email has essentially cut out the postmaster as middleman and created a new sociology.

And now we have Twitter! The modern world is an impatient one. It is peopled by impatient young men and women armed with impatient technologies. It breeds a culture of impatience, but patience still has its role in life. Some things take time! Twitter or no twitter a baby stays cooped up in the womb for 9 months.

It is okay to get into the flow of instant life but if you don’t hold patience as a virtue you will make unnecessary mistakes. You may even bungle your life! The big decisions in life require maturity.

There are some things you can’t know unless time elapses. For example you know people better with the passage of time. Time affords you the luxury of deep knowledge. Experience is also a necessary component of life and experience cannot be rushed. My father used to tell me, festina lentes. It means make haste slowly. And that is my advice to you today: make haste slowly. Fast food, fast cars, fast girls, fast boys, fast life, fast bucks… Make haste slowly!

I wish you the best as always in this wonderful adventure called life!

Your mentor, LA.

*NB. I hope you read that patiently

 

 

©Leke Alder 2013

Tags : Patience

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