How to Build Your Patience Muscle
Generally speaking, I dislike going to art galleries. It is not that I dislike art. Just the opposite. It is the implicit psychology of the place that torments me. There are just too many options, and the pressure I feel (I know, I know, I own this) to really enjoy all of the 5000 paintings and sculptures and all the little bowls from 10,000 years ago. For me, it is the equivalent of going to a department store to buy clothes — a nightmare of too many options and too many stimuli.
When I leave a department store I always feel exhausted and miserable except for the ‘finally got the hell out of jail’ relief I imagine a prison inmate would experience upon walking past the prison gates into the fresh air of freedom.
Not so for my wife Lea Ann. She is an artist, so she is tickled pink to go to art galleries. And as I trail along behind her on my invisible psychological leash of wanting to please her, from one room to another, I dream, like a toddler dreaming of mac and cheese, of walking through the exit into the fresh air of freedom.
A new light was shed on this “issue” of mine by a story in the masterpiece Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book is not another tome on becoming a fully optimized human productivity machine. Instead, it is meditation and philosophical exploration of our very human relationship with this thing (if it is a thing) called time.
In the exquisitely interesting chapter on developing the psychological muscle of patience, Mr. Burkeman tells the story of the Harvard Art History Professor Jennifer Roberts and the seemingly sadistic assignment she foists on all of her art history students: choose a sculpture or painting at a museum and go look at it for 3 hours straight. No electronics allowed. No switching paintings.
You might be able to imagine my reaction as I imagined this nightmarish idea. A wave of lanugo straightening anxiety crested over my body from head to toe. Before I could consider the idea rationally the subterranean regions of my brain started a conversation with me by shouting — “no f***ing way.
Mr. Burkeman appears to have had a similar reaction when he tried the exercise. He picked Cotton Merchants in New Orleans by Edgar Degas and sat down for the vigil. He notes — “as I squirmed in my seat at the Harvard Art Museum, when I’d willingly have done countless other things I can’t stand — shopping for clothes (we are brothers on this one), assembling flat-pack furniture, stabbing myself in the thigh with thumbtacks — simply because I could have done them in a rush, instead of having to be patient.”
Mr. Burkeman notes that the first 40–90 minutes are the most difficult. Picturing him sitting there suffering brought to mind the scene in the movie Clockwork Orange where the sociopathic character Alex is strapped to a front-row seat with clips on the eyelids to force him to watch violent images in an effort to eliminate his criminal impulses.
Having survived the first 80 minutes of his Clockwork Orange-like session, Mr. Burkeman notes a shift in his demeanor, a shift he calls a “second-order change.” You start to relax, the clips come off, you quit trying to escape, you finally stop looking at the painting, and instead you actually start see it.
To quote: “the Degas began to reveal its secret details: subtle expressions of watchfulness and sadness on the faces of the three men — one of whom, you notice properly for the first time, is a Black merchant in an otherwise white milieu — plus an unexplained shadow you hadn’t previously seen, as if a fourth person were lurking out of view; and a curious optical illusion that renders one of the figures either conventionally solid or transparent, like a ghost..”
The reward for this monumental act of patience, for “surrendering the fantasy of controlling the pace of reality” — no matter if you are stuck with a painting for 3 hours, or in a conversation with a loved one (when you will actually begin to see their humanity), stuck in traffic, or cooking a meal for dinner, is to achieve, at last, “a real sense of purchase on that reality.”
Next time I go to an art gallery with Lea Ann, I am going to plan ahead, pick a painting or two that I might like to see, and I will sit with it, and see if I can see it. It seems to me that if we can give up the effort to outrun reality, if we can arrive instantly, and start to see, that a lot of the beasts of pressure that constantly claw at our modern backs will lose their grip on us.
A good way to practice the habit of arriving instantly is with the Waking Up meditation app by Sam Harris. Unlike a lot of other meditation projects, Harris focuses heavily on getting us to think of our conscious awareness — ie consciousness — as a sort of home, a place of rest, that we can return to over and over again throughout our days.
A common refrain of Harris at the beginning of nearly all of his guided meditations is to “see if you can arrive immediately” and “fully commit” to the next 10 minutes,” whereupon he notes that all of our problems and stuff to do during the day will be there waiting, regardless.
This simple concept, practiced daily with his guidance, has the potential to create a second-order shift in how you approach each day, and your life. I still get swept up in the hyper-pressurized mental fires raging in my brain (and of course this is just a sensation) but I now have an immediate antidote that allows me to again get “a real sense of purchase on reality” and to relax, if only for a short time.
Little breaks like that are nice. With time and practice, they can help you shed the pressure beasts on your back, help you build the patience muscle for everyday life, and maybe just learn how to relax, and still get shit done.
