It's fair to say / that patience has a terrible name.

For one thing, / the prospect of doing anything / that you've been told will require patience / simply seems unattractive.

More specifically, though, / it's disturbingly passive.

It is the virtue / that has traditionally been urged upon housewives, / while their husbands led more exciting lives / outside the home; / or on racial minorities, / told to wait just a few more decades / for their full civil rights.

The talented but self­effacing employee / who "waits patiently" for a promotion, / we tend to feel, / will be waiting a long time: / she ought to be trumpeting her achievements instead.

In all such cases, / patience is a way / of psychologically accommodating yourself / to a lack of power, / an attitude intended to help you / to resign yourself / to your lowly position, / in theoretical hopes of better days to come.

But as society accelerates, / something shifts.

In more and more contexts, / patience becomes a form of power.

In a world geared for hurry, / the capacity to resist the urge / to hurry — / to allow things to take the time they take — / is a way / to gain purchase on the world, / to do the work that counts, / and to derive satisfaction / from the doing itself, / instead of putting off all your fulfillment / to the future.