On Patience

By Dennis J. Darland

October 12, 2007

One of my greatest problems in life is having the patience to do the things that I need or want to do.  I am uncertain how much of this is due to my illness [schizoaffective disorder bipolar type], how much due to medications for it, and how much due to environment.  It is a problem I did not always have.  I used to routinely do things which required a great deal of patience – in school, and at work.  The problem did not occur at any precise point in time.  I would say I noticed such problems first when returning to graduate school at UNL in 1978, after missing a semester after my first diagnosis [I was initially diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia]. But, even after then, I was able to perform, at work, some tasks which required a great deal of patience, i.e. reading books, studying software, and implementing software. Over this period of time, however, and even before I sometimes think, my abilities have been declining. It, is more, I think, a problem of patience than intelligence however. My perception is that this is not only my problem, but an increasing problem in our society.  We want “instant” everything.  TV requires a very short attention span, and that and movies is how, increasingly, people spend their time.  Books are less read. I actually understand some philosophy [Whitehead and Quine] better than before. But I am unable to study for substantial periods of time, even though I understand it much more than I did years ago.  I want to get through the books faster, and end up sitting it down.  I have greater persistence working on software – in fact I often have a hard time stopping working on it – especially debugging.  But I tend to not have enough patience to plan and check the software systematically. I am trying to force myself to do so from now on.  And to stick to reading one book before jumping to another, etc. but it is difficult for me.

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