The problem with patience is it runs out.
We humans struggle with time because we have thoughts about it that make us crazy. We think, for example, that the passing of 3, 5 or even 20 years is a long time. But in a larger perspective, the perspective of our eternal reality, even 20 years is less time than a blink of an eye.
This time value perspective accompanies fears of death. If we don’t accomplish what we set out to in his lifetime, relative to those accomplishments, we are failures. We don’t acknowledge our eternal natures we get bunged up when we think time is running out.
The same can be said for fears around climate change: We think this earth is the only one we have and so the loss of it due to climate change – man-made or otherwise – is an unforgivable, unacceptable outcome. “It’s the only one we have.”
No. It’s not.
The same is true for our lives.
Still with me? Good.
The cool thing about giving up this myopic perspective is a level of freedom which allows one to relax into big hairy ass goals such as Copiosis. When you run out of patience, you start making less-than effective decisions leading to less-than effective actions and less-than effective results.
So what are we to do?
Temet Nosce
Get to know yourself. That is the key to everything. If you think you’re mortal, that there is no god and nothing after death, you haven’t learned very much.
What does this have to do with creating anything better than capitalism? Capitalism is fundamentally about your need to repay the creator for a debt that is unredeemable. Kings and queens put themselves between “god” and you, set themselves up as the only divine humans on earth, then demanded your fealty in the form of homage to them. This still takes place throughout society. From your nation and its demands that you pay taxes….all the way down to your parents demanding you obey them (I brought you into this world!).
Until you discover you owe no one anything and that you are in fact the god people keep talking about, you are bound to fall into the trap of patience: trying to hold hope that what you’re wanting will happen when it happens. And the problem with patience is: it almost always runs out.
Better to know, than to have patience.
How do we get people to let go of this?
We have to reach them person by person. We’re not alone in this. There re plenty of people working with people on this. Over time, we’ll mostly collectively let this go.