About Patience

Patience is a virtue. My mother constantly told us. I wonder which nun had drummed that into her in her youth. Patience appears virtually non-existent today. Time and patience appear to have gone off down opposing paths. It’s a sad story. I recall a time when they were like new found friends. Walking hand in hand. Enjoying each other’s company. Creating new ideas, developing concepts and projects. Together. Slowly, Over time and with patience. Delighting in the time taken to make something of quality. To produce a work of art, or a genuine product that had a real lifetime of use, not an item which would survive (barely) to the moment, the very second after the warranty expires. Patience and Time wandering through my youth. Communicating with each other on equal terms. Then, somewhere along the way, probably towards the end of the twentieth century, something happened that pulled them apart. Greed was one affecting factor. Greed drove a wedge between them. They were forced down those opposing paths. Quality which had become a friend was abandoned. Time was sent off spiralling down a slippery slope. Patience was crushed. You can see it all around you today.

How has this affected us? For example, we are told by many in today’s modern world that due to the cost of wages, we cannot afford to make most products in Australia today. The time taken to make something makes the cost exorbitant. Hang on. Don’t we have this completely wrong? They claim we take too long to do something. That is not the problem. The problem is greed. Plain and simple. People today want EVERYTHING. They all want it NOW. INSTANTLY. They do not want to wait for something. They do not want to earn it. They do not want to spend time to acquire it. They do not want to pay the price they should pay to get it. That’s why we don’t make things in Australia. They have to have the ‘best’ and ‘latest’ now. Unfortunately this has changed the meaning of ‘the best’. In fact, because of demand, quality has almost vanished. The markets are flooded with cheap imitations of original items, that may once have been a quality item.

Demand. Even the word sounds aggressive. There was a era (even in my youth, not so long ago) when people developed their skills, over time. They slowly worked at getting better at what they did, made, produced or created. Now it seems they want it done immediately. They do not buy that single chair for their house, which was how I started when flatting. As I could afford it (there being a big part of the difference) I added to my flat. Today, people borrow ‘on credit’ so they do not have to wait. They want it Instantly. Instant food, instant materials, even, instant buildings. There is now a prefabrication system in Japan, where a person can walk into a showroom on Monday, and walk into their completed house on Friday. Two stories, eight rooms. Basically it is four or eight pods of cement joined together, and the interiors finished as per your selection on Monday. All you have to do is have a slab of cement and the water and electricity connections ready to be attached. Frightening concept when you think about it. But you get it NOW. You don’t have to wait. You don’t need to worry about patience. Or time. Until the repayments.

(Continued tomorrow)