Patience

One of the classes I took at Pennsylvania Career Link was about interviewing skills. This is a useful class, since it's been more than fifteen years since I interviewed for a job at a new company, and a few things have changed since then. One of the things an interviewer will very likely do is ask you to name your greatest weakness. The trick is this: every weakness can also be a strength. You must phrase your response in such a way that you communicate your weakness, but then turn it around and show it to be a strength.

That's easy, I thought. Laziness. I am a very lazy person. I do not mean I am slothful, or an idler; I mean I will not do things the hard way if doing them the easy way is just as effective. I take a Taoist approach to things: just as water flows along the line of least resistance, so in all things you must seek the path along which things flow and learn to travel that path. (In time the water which flows along the easy path will achieve great things - look at the Grand Canyon.) I tend to determine the simplest, most efficient ways of doing things, and then do them that way. Then I teach others to do the same. Other people prefer the harder route because it is harder; they seem to have an instinct to throw themselves at the fan blade of life, over and over again. Of course, the "easy way" can sometimes appear to be the hard way; double-digging a garden is enormous work at first, but once established, it is an extremely labor-free way of growing flowers and vegetables - so much so that in Ireland, double-dug beds are called "lazy beds." So, yes, laziness it is.

"Never say laziness," the instructor added immediately.

Crap, I thought. OK, what else?

Patience.

In about fourth grade one of the nuns said to me in the middle of class, "You'll probably grow up to be a scientist, because you have so much patience." I think that was meant as a compliment, but with nuns you can never be sure. I have always had an enormous degree of patience. My hobbies, which include gardening and backyard astronomy, are not ones for people who need instant gratification. When I plant a seed I know it will be a long time before I see any results; the compost I start today will not be ready for weeks, maybe longer. I must wait hours each day to see the stars, and then I must scan the skies slowly and carefully to pick out the things I am looking for. In my old job I could wait patiently for a client to respond to my questions - there is a fine line between asking repeatedly for information and harassing a client who could choose to take their work elsewhere. And if you've followed my adventures with this computer, the fact that I have not yet hurled it out a window says something of my patience.

But my patience can appear to others to be inertia, a willingness to stay calm and motionless and let the mountain come to me. It is like this even in my job search - perhaps I have been too patient in waiting for responses that might never come. Maybe the patience which serves me so well in some things is doing me a disservice here.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote "He will win who knows when to fight, and when not to fight." (It's been a long time since I packed away my copy, so I think I'm remembering that quote from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Last Outpost".) Perhaps this is something I need to learn: when to be patient, and when to aggressively press my point. It seems that if I am willing to wait forever for some things, the cosmic all is perfectly happy with letting me wait. Patience is my virtue, and also my vice. It is a strength and a weakness. And that, I suppose, is my answer to that question.