To do things well, we need to learn patience

I have a new diagnosis for us.

ADC. Attention deficit culture.

We seem to be intolerant of waiting for anything. It’s not just waiting that is difficult; attending to a task has become more complicated than ever.

I walked by a book, “The One-Minute Manager.” I could only guess that the sequel will be “The 15-Second Manager.” Why bother managing at all if you only have one minute to attend to the task?

I manage things all the time. My goal is never to time manage my activities into a moment. My goal is to manage with thoughtfulness, connection and allowing for an exchange of ideas. Trust me, this takes more than three minutes.

I worry about our hunger for faster and faster movement. We seem to be moving at a speed that is not human. Maybe we are competing with technology.

I was sitting with a child last week, helping her learn to knit. If you watch someone gliding along with needles, knitting looks easy and effortless, but the beginning knitter really struggles to get going.

After the third time that I had to stop the girl and correct her movements, she became very apologetic.

I told her to stop apologizing; this could take 50 or 70 tries on her part until she felt like she could move the yarn and needles and remember what to do.

I told her that everyone she watched knit had to go through this very slow start. It’s just part of learning to knit.

She relaxed, 10 more tries, and she was beginning to show some patience with herself.

That’s why I teach kids to knit. I want them to learn to be patient with themselves.

I think patience is grossly underrated in our ADC culture. Patience is the main ingredient for many human activities.

Our ADC culture is striving for ever shorter shortcuts to get somewhere faster. What if getting there doesn’t matter at all? What if doing it fast isn’t really a yardstick for measuring a task?

It’s easy to confuse cost efficiencies with other things that aren’t measured in dollars and cents.

Last week I attended a lecture by Muhammad Yunus, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

He is an economist and the founder of the Grameen Bank. The enormous success of his work and Grameen Bank has been to run a bank based on principles completely opposite of banking as we know it. He is renowned for his work in micro-finance.

He has a new book out explaining how important it is to recognize that if we measure everything in terms of cost efficiency, we will do more harm than good. He makes the point that when we are striving to do good or to solve a social problem, we must measure it using other criteria.

You can learn more about the other criteria in his book, “Creating a World Without Poverty.”

I’m convinced that in our drive-through culture, we must learn when to pause. The goal is not always to do it faster or to beat our own time, but instead how to give our full attention to what’s at hand.

We must learn how to slow down and interact in human time rather than moving through our days at car speed or computer speed.

Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother, and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.