Learning to Be Patient (Notes from the Floor)

Patience, I thought I knew, was a virtue I had in reasonable supply. I was patient at work. I was patient in queues. I was patient with technology and with other people's driving and with the long slow process of getting a government document issued.

Then I had a toddler. And I understood that what I had was not patience. It was the absence of adequate provocation.

The provocation

The provocation arrives in the form of a two-year-old who has decided, for reasons that are entirely their own and will never be fully explained, that they will not put on their shoes.

Not that they cannot. They can. You have watched them put their shoes on independently, with concentration and pride, on many occasions. Today is not one of those occasions. Today the shoes are the enemy and you are the shoes' ally and this is a betrayal of the highest order.

You have somewhere to be. This is always the condition in which the shoe protest erupts — never on a leisurely morning with nowhere particular to go, always on the morning of the doctors appointment or the one time this month you planned to be somewhere on time.

You begin with reason. You explain the shoes. You explain the destination. You explain, carefully, that shoes are necessary for the destination. The two-year-old listens to all of this with what appears to be respectful attention and then says, clearly and with finality, "No shoes."

What happens next

What happens next depends on the day. On a good day — and goodness here is entirely a function of how much sleep I have had — I find something in myself that is genuinely calm. That can hold the situation at a slight remove and notice, with something approaching appreciation, that this is extremely funny. That I am, in fact, being outmanoeuvred by someone a third of my height who learned to talk fourteen months ago.

On a bad day, I feel the impatience as a physical thing. It rises somewhere around the sternum and moves upward. It is not anger, exactly — not yet — but it is the precondition for anger and I know it well enough now to recognise what it is.

On both days, what actually works — the only thing that ever actually works — is to get down on the floor. To come to his level. To stop being the person standing above him with the shoes and become, instead, the person sitting next to him. From down here, the shoes still need to go on, but the urgency dissolves a little. There is something about physical equality of position that makes the standoff feel less like a standoff.

He puts the shoes on himself, slowly and with enormous ceremony, while I sit on the floor and watch. We are four minutes late. I find, to my surprise, that I don't mind.

On the practice

The floor is a good teacher. It is difficult to maintain a sense of urgency on the floor. It is difficult to hurry from the floor. The floor is where a two-year-old lives — where most of his world happens — and visiting it repeatedly has done something to my relationship with hurry that I cannot entirely explain.

I am not patient. I want to be clear about this. I am a person who is slowly, imperfectly, under significant tutorial pressure, learning to wait. To allow things to take the time they take. To accept that the timeline I have in my head is a proposal and that proposals are routinely rejected by the management.

The management is two years old and deeply committed to its work. I am beginning to respect that.