August 19
Patience is the art of hoping. And great thoughts do not come from the clever head but from the heart — from what a person has learned to bear.
Reflections and Maxims (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Patience is the art of hoping. And great thoughts do not come from the clever head but from the heart — from what a person has learned to bear.
Sometimes someone close to you goes through something you have already left behind. You recognize the phase: the circling around the same question, the irritation at well-meant advice. And you have a sentence ready, one that took you a long time back then.
You say it, but it doesn't land. It sounds like one of those pieces of advice that irritated you. That doesn't make it wrong. It only lacks the time in which it became true for you: the evenings when you couldn't yet believe it.
An insight like that, it seems, can't be passed on like an address. It is bound to the path by which it came about, and that path is one you would wish on no one. Still, you want to shorten it. You do it for the other person, but perhaps also so that your own detour will, in hindsight, have been good for something.
So you stay nearby and say less. Months later you may hear your sentence from the other person's mouth, in their own words. They no longer remember that you once said it.
