Of all the things technology has disrupted, our patience has taken the biggest hit. Once we were a people who could wait 4 to 6 weeks for our Disco Fever albums to arrive from Columbia House Records, but now if our iTunes playlist takes more than 15 seconds to download, we're screaming obscenities and kicking chairs.
We've become angry, impatient individuals.
We keep saying we want patience, even pray for it, but when we get the chance to demonstrate patience, shit usually hits the fan.
Remember when microwaves were a luxury? Remember when we had to chop, slice, and actually cook our food on the stove? Now we don't have time for that! We want our food fast 'cause we have things to do!
When I wrote a report for school, I loaded a piece of paper in my mom's Smith Corona typewriter and typed about 13 words a minute, or until all the key stuck together and I had to pry them apart. If I made a grammatical or spelling mistake and didn't have any white-out, I sighed and rolled a new piece of paper to start over.
Now we type 80 words a minute - on a keyboard the size of a bar of soap - grammar be damned! Who has time for the spelling and the punctuation and the sentence structure? Not us. We've reverted to sending text messages made up entirely of images because who has time to make words?
If you had pioneer ancestors, patience should be an intricate part of your DNA. After all, these stalwart men and women walked for weeks to bring their families to Utah. They walked and walked with no distractions, barring the occasional oxen breakdown. Now we sit in traffic, honking and barking at fellow commuters who don't move fast enough when the light turns green.
It used to be we had to wait YEARS between Star Wars movies. We had to wait an entire WEEK to catch up on our favorite TV show. And if we missed an episode, we were out of luck until summer reruns. Now people binge-watch entire seasons of shows in a weekend and download pirated movies before they're even in theaters.
Before cell phones, there we no middle of the night conversations unless you were lucky enough to have a pair of walkie talkies with a range of about 10 feet. But if you stuck your head out the window and leaned toward your friend's house, and if he did the same, you could almost hear each other on the walkie talkies. By that point, you could just yell across the yard to each other.
Now we're stuck to our phones having never-ending conversations by text, instant messaging, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, etc. But we're not saying anything. Meaningful discussions seem to have gone the way of the typewriter and handcart.
We're too busy to send handwritten thank-you notes. We don't send postcards from trips. No one knows what a treat long-distance phone calls were to grandparents. We've forgotten the tolerance we needed as the telephone line connected to the internet, making that horrible data sound that rattled your back teeth.
Patience is more than a virtue. It makes us empathetic, helpful, optimistic, and kind. It reminds us not everything has to be fast. It gives us the chance to look forward to something, like listening to the Disco Fever album from Columbia House Records, delivered by the mailman in only 6 weeks.
Submitted July 05, 2017 at 08:51PM by The3Broomsticks http://ift.tt/2urRezq
