Is being impatient a small kind of cruelty?

The short answer Impatience is mostly a failure of attention wearing a virtue’s mask—you call it drive, but it’s the refusal to meet a thing at its own speed. And yes, it can be a small cruelty, because what you’re impatient with was usually already going as fast as it could. The child tying the shoe, the slow queue, the healing that won’t be rushed—push at them and you don’t arrive sooner; you just do a little violence to something that had no more speed to give. Most of what we’re impatient with was never slow. We were only early.

The longer answer

Watch a small child tie a shoe. The tongue comes out. The fingers, still clumsy at it, make the loops slowly, lose one, start again, the whole operation absurdly, agonizingly slow to an adult standing over them with somewhere to be. And you feel it rise in you—the itch to crouch down and just do it, to take the laces out of those fumbling hands and have it done in three seconds, because you are late and this is taking forever.

That itch is impatience, and the shoe shows you exactly what it is, because the child is not being slow. The child is going precisely as fast as a child learning to tie a shoe can possibly go. There is no faster available. Your impatience is not a response to avoidable delay; it’s a collision between your schedule and the true speed of a real thing, and the thing is simply moving at its own honest pace, which happens not to be yours.

And here’s where it curdles into something like a small cruelty. When you snatch the lace, or bark ‘hurry up,’ or crouch to do it yourself, you’re not correcting a fault—there was no fault—you’re punishing a thing for the crime of taking the time it takes. The child learns, in that small moment, that their real pace is an annoyance, that being slow-because-still-learning is something to be ashamed of. Multiply that across a childhood, or a marriage, or a life spent hurrying people who were already at full stretch, and you’ve done a quiet, cumulative violence to a great many things whose only offence was moving at their own speed.

Most of what we’re impatient with is like the shoe. The queue is moving as fast as the queue can move. The grief is healing as fast as grief heals. The bread is proving as fast as yeast proves. None of them is being slow at you; they have a true speed, and you’ve arrived early, and the honest thing is not to lean on them but to notice that your impatience is your own to hold, not theirs to fix.

Whether patience can really be learned, or is just a temperament you’re born with or without, I’m genuinely unsure. But I know the shoe won’t tie faster for your standing over it. It may be so. It may not.