Sunset, sunrise: Virtue or Agency?

Sunrise, May 25, 2023

A memory:

It is nine p.m. on May 24, 2023. The sunset is crimson watercolor leeching into a blue canvas. I am driving south from Traverse City to Cadillac, MI for the night. It is a new reality for me, sleeping away from home, away from my kids. An old life is ending. As I make the hour drive, I am working out what is necessary for a new life to begin. I arrive at my family cottage in Cadillac, a place I have known all my life, and I quickly prepare the small daybed in the kitchen. I have with me a pillow and a handwoven blanket from the Baja Peninsula of Mexico as my portable sleeping arrangement. I sleep. My alarm rings at six a.m. and I am up. I gather my things, and I am back on the road. The sunrise is a golden furnace, the glowing light unfolding the promise of the day. My life is changing. I feel the urgency of all that I need to do next. Yet I know in my heart, I must be patient with the process. 

As a kid, I was taught that patience is a virtue. I was told that good things come to those who wait. I am not sure the sentiment here is totally accurate. Waiting does not guarantee good things. In fact, today the virtue seems to be flipped. The more common sentiment is that urgency is agency, implying that good things come to those that make it happen.

There is truth here. Volume, repetition, these are foundations of skills building. Urgency gets us out of bed and chasing the next idea, it keeps us shipping our work.

It's been a few weeks since I posted on my blog. And to be honest, it has felt a bit like a lack of urgency. I have drafted a handful of posts, so I can’t blame it on a writer’s block. I could have posted my drafts for the sake of posting, but none of them felt like the right story to tell. Maybe another way to think about this past month is that I had too many stories to tell all at once.

Life was a bit of a whirlwind. I went to Puerto Rico, took a new job, and went to Chicago for a work trip. When I got home, I spent an evening in the ER admitting my dad to the hospital with a spiral fracture in his leg. A day later, my oldest daughter, Hadley, turned thirteen and I hosted a birthday dinner. Then my nine-month-old golden retriever, Fin, ate a dish towel and had emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction.

Being present this past month has been important, there were real gifts in each of these experiences. But it also required taking urgency out of certain aspects of life: setting down personal ambitions, slowing progress on my photography and writing, delaying time spent with friends, letting the dishes and laundry pile up.

A former boss and friend used to have a quote on his whiteboard that read, “don’t force the kinetic solution.” It means that sometimes taking too much action can create bigger problems, create undue friction, and stress. Sometimes, patience, not urgency, really is the answer.  

As a writer, I have learned the lesson of too much urgency. Urgency can be an ego indulgence. We feel that the action of urgency is a sense of accomplishment in and of itself. We feel we are working hard, and that is the pay off, rather than working well. If you were to look through my hard drive, you’d find hundreds of ideas for novels. It’s my urgent ego that wants to make every idea into a hundred-thousand-word epic.

It is here that patience comes in. We tell ourselves, slow down, good things come to those who wait. But this is an incomplete way of thinking, too. I think the point is more like: can we endure hard things, hard times, suboptimal conditions, times of delayed gratification? Can we set aside the want for the necessity? Are we willing to do the work to earn the reward?

While urgency serves action, patience serves our decisions. Urgency is raw material; patience is a filter for refinement. Urgency is a tool of creation; patience is a tool of editing. Urgency is the accelerator; patience is the breaks. Urgency keeps us moving forward; patience helps us to remain present. Both are critical.

Patience and urgency require one another. This was clear to me on those lonely rides in May of 2023, watching the sunsets and sunrises. If I reflect on the arc of my life since then, I can clearly see how critical both urgency and patience have been and I would amend that adage, good things come to those who wait. Instead, I would say that good things come to those that have the agency of urgency and the virtue of patience.

So here I am feeling the urgency, getting back to the work of writing, reflecting on those sunsets and sunrises driving to and from my family cottage nearly two years ago, and I remind myself to be patient with the process.   

The sun will set. The sun will rise. The days will keep passing. Have the agency of urgency and the virtue of patience. It’s a recipe for good things.