The Undervalued Virtue

I can't recall who coined the phrase "patience is a virtue," but the words are nonetheless ingrained in our collective head. They are uttered as if writ by God. Mothers remind their children, teachers their students and golf pros their frustrated amateurs. But I wonder if these immortal words deserve their sanctified status.

Impatience, I believe, would make for a much better virtue. I am not a victim of the destruction of our American moral fabric. I have simply concluded that impatience affords one a far greater amount of time in which to accomplish both the trivial and the significant.

It was during last Thursday's Biological Sciences 2 field laboratory that I arrived at this conclusion. BS 2 labs are regularly three hours long. Last week's trip to the fauna of the Harvard-owned Concord hillside, though, ended up dragging on a bit longer. The 5 p.m. deadline for our scheduled return to Harvard turned to 6 p.m. even before we departed.

So we piled ourselves into the yellow buses. Upon arrival, we immersed ourselves in the identification and classification of 15 different species of plant within a 25' x 5' yard plot. A majority of students expressed a desire to return early. Other students indulged themselves in experiments entirely separate from the exercise at hand. The virtue of impatience came into play. Indeed, were it not for a few students' deliberate prodding and urging, we might still be in Concord looking for European Pigthorn. One might conclude that this anecdote reflects not impatience but rather efficiency. It may be seen, however, that the two go hand in hand.

Take a common problem for most Harvard students: procrastination. Led by the words of our anonymous philosopher, students consciously or not ensure that a five-page paper requiring two hours of focused work engulfs the entire day.

This immortal phrase encourages self-delusions such as: "Watching Baywatch is good for me because it allows me to most thoroughly absorb and understand exactly what Jefferson meant by the pursuit of happiness" or "Staying in the dining room so that none of my friends eat alone will teach me what Baumol and Blinder mean when they talk of consumers with different tastes and preferences."

Human nature is such that we try to find the simplest reason to be lazy. When we are universally taught that patience is a virtue, it does not take much to conclude that idleness is a key component of patience. Were that we were able to recognize that the virtue of patience lies in the prudence and discretion which it affords.

If we were to learn the virtue of impatience, we would work more efficiently. The lessons impatience teaches us are remedies for the desire to do nothing. Think for a moment about the amount of time one could save if motivated by impatience. The time taken by labs could be cut in half, reading time could be sliced by a third and papers due on Friday would be finished in time to watch that most glorified set of hours: Thursday night television. The virtue of patience cultivates laziness.

The virtue of impatience has universal application. When playing golf, the average 18-hole round at a regular pace ought to take three hours. But what inevitably ends up happening is a disastrous four-and-a-half hour round. Guided by the virtue of patience, golfers address the ball for hours rather than simply relaxing and taking a swing. The practice of impatience does not demand an abandonment of prudence and discretion. In fact, it requires just the opposite.

By stressing efficiency and the value of time, the philosophy of virtuous impatience affords one the time to exercise discretion. Guided by patience, we too often finds ourselves in circumstances which unnecessarily consume our time. Human nature is prone to laziness. Were we to live by the virtue of impatience, we would temper our laziness sufficiently to allow for the completion of our tasks and the enjoyment of all those idle pleasures we hold dear.