Time is On My Side

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

— Somerset Maugham

I don't care for many aspects of aging.

The mysterious sore knees and feet and back muscles.

Pretty women calling me "Sir."

Automatically getting the senior discount.

Those things suck.

But one noticeable aspect of aging pleases me immensely: discovering the power of patience.

Without patience, I could never have made painting my second career.

Because painting consumes time—tons of it. (I just spent 30 hours painting a single eye and am not finished with it yet.)

"Patience is bitter," Rousseau said, "but its fruit is sweet."

Why I had to grow old to at long last discover patience puzzles me.

Maybe I lacked the patience to look for it.

Maybe I had no time for patience.

What eluded me, I think, was knowing that patience wields power impatience lacks.

Patience is a weapon.

"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait," Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace. "But believe me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all."

I guess all this is a roundabout way of saying that age, if you're lucky, brings with it a sobriety that's missing in youth and middle age. (No surprise, some AA groups recite an "extended" Serenity Prayer that adds, "Grant me patience for the changes that take time.")

English borrowed the word sobriety seven centuries ago from the Latin sobrius.

Sobrius meant not only abstemious, but calm, steady, unhurried, still.

In a word, patient.

Age means, though vastly finite, time at last is on my side.

Above: Five of Five. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches. Available.