I talk about SLOWING DOWN and ZEN and things ... and I've realized that PATIENCE is the same thing.

I have been becoming more interested in patience recently. I was at a friend's having a couple beers and "working" on his truck. He was getting it ready for summer. All of a sudden, another light went on in my head and I realized how incredibly patient he is. He calls it ANTICIPATION. At first, I thought "yea, it's anticipation all right, but that's exactly what drives me CRAZY!"

He ENJOYS it.

"Hmmmm" I thought.

Right now I'm in the middle of reading a book called "The Soul's Code," by James Hillman. I came across the following and thought I'd share it.

p. 24-26

Failures in our loves, friendships, and families often come down to failures of imaginative perception. When we are not looking with the eye of the heart, love is indeed blind, for then we are failing to see the other person as bearer of an acorn of imaginative trust. A feeling may be there, but not the sight; and, as the vision clouds, so do sympathy and interest. We feel only annoyed, and we resort to diagnostic and typological concepts. But your husband is not "mother-bound"; he whines and expects and is often paralyzed. Your wife is not "animus-ridden"; she is peremptory, argues logically, and can't let go. How they are is who they are, and not what they are said to be by types and classes.

Imaginative perception takes patience. As the alchemists said of their laborious frustrating experiments, "In your patience is your soul." how else meet the other's incomprehensible behavior, that oddness, that slowness? Dr. Edward Teller didn't speak until he was past three and was thought to be retarded. "One day Edward did talk, and it was in sentences, not words, as if he had been saving the effort until he had something to say." Dr. Benjamin Spock "spoke very little until he was over three, and when he did say anything he spoke with maddening slowness." Martin Buber, too, began to talk only at three. One of James Thurber's teachers "told his mother that he might be deaf." Woodrow Wilson, perhaps America's most bookish President, "had not learned his letters until he was nine years old and could not read until he was twelve." Former biographers blamed Wilson's relations with his mother and his father for this delay. Up-to-date biography prefers a psychiatric diagnosis, declaring "that Woodrow Wilson had developmental dyslexia," suggesting the blame be placed in his brain.

Dyslexia, chronic lateness, distractability, hyperactivity make up "attention deficit disorder" - and what patience it demands. Yet how else contain and tease out what this "deficit" also shows? Children so categorized, and adults too, are often those with above-average intelligence, given to day-dreams, and with such widely open sensitive souls that their "ego" behavior is noncompliant and disorganized. Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax - of course, they work. But because they work against the deficit does not confirm the cause of it or disclose its meaning. Crutches work, but they can't account for your broken leg. Why is this disorder so prevalent today? What does the soul not want to attend to, and what might the daimon be doing when it is not reading, not speaking, and not fulfilling performance expectations? To discover this takes patience, and that imaginative perception that Henry James described as "a prolonged hovering over the case exposed."

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