This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
CHICAGO • Almost everyone has an old parental saw about patience. My husband tells our sons that, in his day, when you wanted to buy something that wasn't available at your local store, you had to order through the mail and it would take six to eight weeks for delivery.
Unfortunately, my parents' attempts to instill patience in me didn't take — it was probably hopeless since the ability to practice patience bedevils the classic type-A personality. I've especially struggled with it in my painful quest to learn to play the piano.
There is an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. After 17 years of owning a piano, trying to teach myself the basics and not hitting it off with instructors, I finally found an intimidating Russian master who has helped me progress faster than I could ever have thought possible.
But this "fast" rate is So. Incredibly. Painfully. Slooooowwwwww.
There is little more than practice, practice, practice without the associated joy of actually making music. Without a doubt, learning to play the piano is the hardest thing I've ever done.
There's nothing worse than knowing every note of the masterpieces of the classic piano repertoire but not being able to make your fingers behave into playing even the kiddie versions from beginner books.
But I think I've just turned a small, but important corner.
I recently picked up "Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living" by Allan Lokos, the founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center in New York City, and began to understand the crux of my dilemma.
Lokos quotes meditation expert Sharon Salzberg: "Impatience is feeling upset because things are not happening on our timetable, or wanting to be more in control of a process so that we can have something happen in the way we'd like to see it happen. It's stepping out of a process in order to fret because something is not happening the way we would like to see it happen."
I've been impatient — because it seems incomprehensible that someone who can play four other instruments should have such a hard time picking up the piano.
I'd been frustrated with the practice because it feels like I'll never get past the repetition to enjoy making the music. But it turns out that practice never ends — it just goes unseen.
In a recent Atlantic article "Is Grit Overrated?" the author Jerry Useem put it this way: "Grit may be essential. But it is not attractive."
Useem writes that in Angela Duckworth's soon-to-be-released book, "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance," the godmother of the grit movement notes that "hidden practice among successful people is costly to society because it obscures the amount of failure that goes into success. Go on YouTube, Duckworth suggests in her book, and try to find footage of 'effortful, mistake-ridden repetitive deliberative practice.' I did and took her point. You cannot watch Yo-Yo Ma tediously repeating a difficult passage, or Ronald Reagan practicing his speeches in front of a mirror, or Steve Jobs unveiling a half-baked iPhone. ... You see only the final products. ... So when we experience messy frustration, we too readily believe that we don't have the right stuff and give up."
Meanwhile, patience master Lokos writes, "The great cellist Pablo Casals was asked why, at age 92, he still practiced four hours a day. He replied, 'Because I believe I am making progress.'"
By my estimate, I will be 96 by the time I've practiced the 10,000 hours it takes to master the piano, so it looks as though, like Casals, I'll be "making progress" until I die.
But the lesson is that while it is especially hard to be patient with ourselves and others, the lightning speed at which life moves these days demands that we cultivate imperturbability.
"We have much less control than we might think over the causes and conditions that converge to bring about the ever-changing circumstances of our lives," Lokos writes. "With practice we can learn to put full effort into our actions without our happiness being dependent upon the ensuing results."
If we are to find happiness and purpose in our lives, we must accept that some things just take a lot of time, or don't always go our way. The art of persevering with patience even when faced with life's delays, unknowns, disappointments, and disruptions can make such challenges still worthwhile.
Twitter, @estherjcepeda