Redefining Patience

At my job, the company is in the process of a very long reorganization which will radically change the lives of many, particularly me and my staff. The frustration with the leadership is that the process to rethink how the organization will function is being done solely by a small group of senor level staff. It is the classic situation where the few on the top are acting for the whole, keeping the process and content secret.

I understand the secrecy is being maintained out of a concern to protect the rest of us from the difficult and painful choices that are being made. At the same time, secrecy itself creates many destructive undercurrents within any system, whether a family or an organization. It is difficult to trust people working in secret when they do not trust you enough to say what is being talked about behind that wall of secrecy.

So when I ran across a subchapter of Seasons of Strength*, titled Patience in Disguise, it grabbed my attention:

"We can recognize three faces of patience, the first being its political guise. This is the virtue that is counseled to persons or groups seeking change. Thus women and blacks and the poor are told, “Be patient.” Here patience usually equals passivity. The communication is, “We will take care of it. Don’t rush us.” When this political advice is heeded, the “patient” mumbles that “nothing can be done” and succumbs to
impotence and inactivity. A virtue is twisted into weakness for purposes of social control.”

This accurately describes the feeling many staff are experiencing at my office. When the reorganization was first announced in January, many responded with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. I encouraged my staff to consider this an opportunity to rethink and improve our work for our customers. At the same time, I urged each person to consider his or her own strengths and weaknesses, to update résumés, and prepare to offer their skills to the leaders. In spite of some trepidation, they followed my urging with a positive spirit.

However, we learned recently that the final unveiling of the reorganization plan will not occur for another two months. Even though I had urged up the chain of command that a clear date to be announced, because it is easier for people to adjust to a concrete date than have no idea when it would occur, I was not prepared for the amount of negative emotions it triggered.

Now, I sense, both in myself in others, a second way in which patience is acted out.

“The second visage of patience, that of the Stoic, appears at the other extreme. Stoic patience is a tough virtue, able to tolerate a great deal of pain. This “virtue” enables one to surmount feelings of loss or injury. Gritting his teeth, the Stoic keeps going. The Stoic “plays through the pain” with an iron will. In such an exercise of patience the person often denies the feelings that accompany the experience. . . . But in a deeper sense, it is a defensive lack of “patience” that we see – the refusal to be open, to receive, to be moved.”

There is a strong emotional appeal for a shut-down way of dealing with the situation. I lived through that my personal life very recently. While the Stoic way of patience can be sustained for short periods of time, it does lead to a complete closing down of one’s feelings, the good and the bad. You cannot allow only the good ones to come out, because once the door is open to the Pandora’s box, everything that is inside wants to be expressed. Many around me are hunkering down to do this over the many weeks ahead.

I know how exhausting and ultimately life-denying the Stoic position is, so, returning to the next passage from the Whiteheads’ book:

“Between these extremes of passivity and compulsive endurance is the active virtue of patience. . . . When we exercise this virtue we do not merely undergo an experience, such as illness or loss, but actively go through it. We are not just passive victims of the crisis; we face it. We can look into it and search out its meaning. This stance differs from both personal passivity and the gritty, Stoic denial of feeling. The virtue of grief, an offspring and heir of the human strength of patience, demands an acceptance of loss. This acceptance comes only with a patient attention to the experience, to both its absurdity and its meaning.”

So, there is the “acceptance of loss” and the “patient attention to the experience, to both its absurdity and its meaning.” I have been working on that sense of having lost something, and the initial work of grieving what was good and nurturing for so long. This process of writing about what is going on, using an external concept to structure my internal process, is one way I engage in paying “patient attention.” It helps in staying out of extremes of passivity or Stoic control.

The authors later note that “shadows of ambiguity and conflict” are a part of the experience. Those shadows really are quite dark at times, obscuring a sense of where to go or what to do next. I sense it when other staff describe how they are coping with the situation. However, it is encouraging that the authors support the kind of internal work I am doing:

“In psychological terms, this virtue demands receptive mastery. . . . to allow myself to fully savor and experience – whether of loss or delight. . . . Without this strength of receptive mastery, lacking the virtue of patience, we may be unable to “hold still” long enough to attend to what is happening to us.”

Just out of curiosity, I searched the Internet for the use of the phrase “receptive mastery,” thinking there must be come intellectual sphere in which it is part of the jargon. Indeed, I found the phrase is used in the study of how people learn a new language. In those situations, “receptive mastery” is a learning stage which may move forward into “productive” or “expressive” mastery in which what has been learned receptively reaches a level of active use. So before one can apply what is being learned, one has to actively “fully savor and experience” it. This engagement with the situation becomes essential in learning from it.

As I struggle to know how to lead my own staff out of the shadows, it is encouraging to know that I must also engage in developing my own self-awareness. I know I must continually be doing my own internal work so as not to manipulate or use them to meet my own personal needs. I know that in being a non-anxious presence with them, I can lead them with my own calmness and focus.

But that is not enough It does not lead me toward how to move ahead. The book fails to offer any further advice, turning its focus to other topics. So I will try to focus on paying attention with patience, knowing I will slide to the extremes of passivity or Stoicism. Maybe in that way I will discover some vision to follow.

*Seasons of Strength: New Visions in Adult Christian Maturing by Evelyn Eaton Whitehead and James D. Whitehead. Authors Guild Backinprint.com edition, 2003, p.89-90.