PAUL DORIN reckons he’s a patient person in all sorts of practical ways, but making him wait, well that’s another story altogether.

I like to think I’m a patient person. I’ve actually had plenty of practice dealing with the rainbow pinwheel loading cursor on my nearly 20-year-old laptop.

It doesn’t just appear occasionally. That little spinning wheel pops up all the time. The laptop freezes, and I wait, and wait. Sometimes I wonder whether the laptop is actually doing anything at all, or whether it’s just checking how patient I am. 

Perhaps this is what patience looks like. Or perhaps I’ve simply become very good at staring at a small, colourful spinning circle. Most of the time, it’s a good opportunity to put the jug on for a cuppa.

The strange thing is, I can be incredibly patient in some situations, in others it disappears almost instantly.

Traffic, for example: I can be cruising along quite happily, listening to the radio, when suddenly I hit a traffic jam.

Within seconds, my entire personality changes. My relaxed brain suddenly calls an emergency meeting. What if the car breaks down? I check the temperature gauge. Check the fuel. Look at the traffic ahead. How long have we been sitting here? Should I turn it off? Is there a side street? Should I pull over and wait? 

I’ve gone from calmly driving the car to planning its emergency evacuation. The traffic hasn’t moved a centimetre, but my mind has travelled several kilometres.

In the kitchen: I can peel a bag of potatoes one at a time with remarkable patience. But put those same potatoes into a pot of boiling water and ask me to wait for them to cook, and suddenly I become anxious.

I start pacing the kitchen, finding things to do. I wipe the bench. Do a few dishes. Check the potatoes. They’re still potatoes. I wander over to the fridge, check the use-by dates, do a clean-out, then check the potatoes again.

Apparently, I have the patience to prepare potatoes but not the patience to watch them become edible.

Then there’s shopping: These days, I’ve discovered I have a tremendous amount of patience when it comes to finding what I think is a bargain. I’ll stand in a supermarket aisle comparing two products for five minutes because one might be a little cheaper. I’ll read and compare the ingredients, put one back, then pick it up again. I have become a forensic investigator of supermarket specials. I can spend 10 minutes trying to save a dollar or find healthier ingredients.

But once I’ve decided and arrive at the self-checkout, my patience suddenly packs its bags and leaves.

There are three people ahead of me. I start looking around. Why is this queue moving so slowly? The person in front of me has an entire trolley. Why are they using the self-checkout? Should I have gone to a checkout with a person? It looks faster. 

Eventually, I arrive at the self-checkout and the machine says: “Unexpected item in the bagging area”. Of course it is. It’s exactly where I put it. I’m beginning to think the machine is testing my patience. too.

Airports are another mystery: I’ll always choose the aisle seat, and I can sit on a plane for hours without too much trouble. But standing in a boarding queue for 10 minutes? That’s different. 

Suddenly I start getting hot, I need to know why we’re not moving, wondering what’s happening. Has something gone wrong? Has security stopped everyone? Why aren’t we moving? By now, I’m starting to sweat. Are the security cameras watching me? Do I look suspicious? I’m doing absolutely nothing, yet somehow I feel like I’m beginning to look guilty.

I’m literally about to spend the next few hours sitting in the same seat. Yet somehow standing still for 10 minutes feels unacceptable.

Maybe that’s the real problem with patience. It isn’t necessarily the amount of time we have to wait. It’s how much we feel we’re wasting while we’re waiting.

I can wait 20 years for my laptop to die. I can spend 10 minutes comparing the price of two tins of baked beans. I can sit on a plane for hours. But ask me to stand in a queue, wait for potatoes to cook or sit in traffic, and suddenly I’m ready to take action.

Perhaps it’s about accepting that sometimes there’s absolutely nothing you can do to make something happen any faster.

I also learned the value of patience while caring for my mother, who had dementia. There were times when things that once seemed simple could take much longer, and becoming frustrated only made things harder. Looking back, perhaps that was one of the most important lessons patience has taught me.

When anxiety kicks in, my patience disappears

A doctor once told me that if you looked at any queue, there would probably be several people in it experiencing some form of anxiety.

That has always made me feel a little better, knowing at least I wasn’t alone. The trouble is, the moment anxiety kicks in, my patience seems to disappear. Apparently, it’s a perfectly normal response. The fight-or-flight response can be a real challenge, although I seem to have mastered both. I have the fight in stressful situations and the flight in traffic situations.

Which brings me back to my laptop. About three months ago, it died and was only surviving on the power cord.

Friends saw this as a clear sign that it was finally time for me to buy a new laptop. But I was patient. I didn’t rush out to replace it. A colleague and handy technical guru found a replacement battery online, and my 20-year-old laptop was miraculously resurrected. It was back to normal. Even the rainbow loading cursor was back to full strength.

As was my patience.

Paul Dorin is the CityNews cartoonist

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