The POWER of PATIENCE

 

A friend of mine sent me this link to a post on HARVARD MAGAZINE dealing with The Power of Patience, a presentation by art historian Jennifer L. Roberts at a The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference last May. I might add that the link was sent to me because patience is not something that I have a lot of!

In this crazy world of instant everything, where things are speeding up and certainly not slowing down, where we are pushed toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity Jennifer Roberts says this:  The virtue of patience was originally associated with forbearance or sufferance. It was about conforming oneself to the need to wait for things. But now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state. Where patience once indicated a lack of control, now it is a form of control over the tempo of contemporary life that otherwise controls us. Patience no longer connotes dis-empowerment—perhaps now patience is power.

What's of particular interest and importance to those of us working in the visual arts is the issue of how there is a tendency to look and not see. Seeing requires time, requires patience, requires perseverance. 

Roberts' complete address is worth a read and there is a YouTube clip as well.