There's a song my sister used to sing to the children she looked after in her day home.
"Patience. Have patience. Don't be in such a hurry. If you have no patience, you only start to worry."
It's a song for children, but it's also a song some adults, including me, should be singing on a more consistent basis.
There is such a "hurry, hurry, hurry" atmosphere around all of us in our modern age. We find it difficult to wait for anything - a phone call to be returned, an e-mail to be read, an appointment to be made, a service to be given. We are in a rush most of the time, running around trying to get important things done in the few minutes a day we can devote to them. And I think it's making us all a little nuts.
Our modern conveniences were meant, in the beginning, to save us time. We don't have to do the wash by hand anymore - we have machines for that - and that's a great thing, in my book. But other inventions, such as a phone we can carry with us at all times that we can use to call, text and e-mail others, seems to cost us time, time with our friends and family. By staying connected all the time, we are becoming disconnected, it seems, from reality and from the people around us.
People are demanding more and more from one another these days, because it seems possible, with our modern inventions, to get more and more from one another.
But the demanding is eating away at our patience with one another, and in some cases, our common sense.
Take, for instance, something that happened last week.
There was a crash on Hwy. 5 due to some slippery road conditions. Emergency workers carefully made their way out of the city in order to help someone who had rolled their vehicle off the road. They closed the highway in order to keep everyone safe - the person involved in the crash, themselves, as they tried to help this person, and the other motorists on the highway.
And did people say thank-you?
Nope. At least some didn't. Instead, they complained about having to wait for the road to open. They complained that they couldn't get to where they were going fast enough.
Even when roads were so slick, you could hardly stand up on them, and trying to drive by the scene of a crash could have meant another one taking place.
Even when someone else was hurt nearby and needed some help.
I'm as guilty as the next person when it comes to being impatient. I know, at times, I can be unreasonable when I need to get somewhere or do something and something else is holding me up. That's usually when that patience song starts playing in the back of my head. Sometimes I do ignore it. Sometimes I mumble it through gritted teeth. But most of the time, it gives me the perspective I need to get through the situation with a semblance of sanity.
If a child can learn to be patient by using this song, I reason, then so can I. Maybe it's a tune we adults all need to learn so we can treat each other with a bit more courtesy and fewer demands.
