There’s a famous Paul Kelly lyric that visits me in moments when I need to meet my own unwisdoms about time — when I’m grappling with how long things take. I’ll let you bump into it in your own time — maybe in the queue at the self-service checkouts, maybe at a house party, maybe in a taxi. It suffices to say that this essay emerged from a curiosity born of accelerating encounters with impatience at a particular time in national history. I’m not referring to the most recent referendum, actually, but rather to a fairly banal pre-election moment. I had been predictably hearing a lot of fast, domineering bluster about what was “obvious”. While I tried to make sense of the swarm of impatient conversations in which I was finding myself, I realised that in order to understand more about impatience I needed to think about waiting.

It doesn’t sound particularly “modern” — does it? — to be a good wait-er. Waiting seems mostly aligned with being unambitious and — god knows! — a lack of ambition can land you in neoliberal, techno-capitalist, white-supremacist prison. They can whack a pair of handcuffs on you and lug you away if you ever give a hint that what you get up for in the morning isn’t, say, Living Your Best Life Right Now Hurry Up. (Of course, if you find yourself in the wrong intersections of the kyriarchy, you can also get scolded for too-much-ambition; it’s very complicated …) In any case, “ambition”, as I often see it modelled or applauded (or five-year-planned) often seems to be about Doing Shit All The Time, irrespective of how stupid (or harmful, or lacking in foresight) that doing might be. Behaviour counts as “ambitious” apparently even when it wrecks things or makes things worse for many people. Another version of “ambition” amounts to conservative ways of getting through life: wanting what you are told you are meant to want and in the correct order. Or another version: Drifting Along with Privilege then Finding Out You’re Doing Well.

I work at a university. Another way to say it is that I am in academe. Either way, try saying to other academics — who these days (like everyone) are bludgeoned with ceaseless reasons to be afraid — that you aren’t working-on-anything-right-now. I was at a conference once, and everyone was dutifully declaring what their next project was. I didn’t have one: a Next, a Project. When it came to me, I could only say: I’m not working on anything. I think I’m … thinking. People adjusted their napkin-balanced scones and conversation stalled somewhat.

If waiting isn’t so hot right now, then neither is impatience the most flattering attribute. A slur? A fault? A mode? A skewed stance in relation to time? Impatience (as a concept or phenomenon) has curiously not offered itself up to examination as easily as anticipated. (Impatience — by the way and as I’ll try to convince you — has got everything to do with anticipation.) I’ve been at this essay for months now. Patiently, mind you, since I know time does its thing when it’s good and ready. As well as being familiar with this as notion, I’m also trained in its bodily disposition. I doubt that I’d be, like, spontaneously patient, if left to my slovenly cellular devices. Not on your life, not in the current moment. Nah — training is the thing (a training designed to interrupt how the world would otherwise train you …). Patience, I want to say then, is something that the meat of your body, its electricals, its skeleton and flesh, either can do or not do, or which it does well sometimes, less well at other times.

In this essay, I want to explore whether impatience can be disambiguated from urgency, and to see whether urgency sometimes involves a crucial and honed capacity to wait. I also want to test the (perhaps less-obvious) thesis here that impatience — boiled down, and below its apparent surface — is about having a problem with transitions.

I know! I know! Doesn’t impatience want a transition — like stat? Isn’t that what impatience is all about? Well, no. After months of pondering while falling asleep, while showering, while walking and while getting cooked-rice off the side of the saucepan, I’ve concluded that impatience might be closely bound up with our difficulty with transitions. Impatience rises up when one’s inertia is messed with. Inertia, if we recall Year 9 physics class, concerns the idea that in a vacuum things would, if left alone, continue in the state of motion or rest they are in. Moving straight keeps moving straight. Immobile remains immobile. Said the other way, it takes another force or influence to change the established motion of something. If stationary, the transition involves a force (or capacity or disposition) required to get moving, something to intervene on the inertia. Or, if you’re moving in one direction already, the transitioning skill would involve altering the direction you’re headed, and this too will require some energy. If you’re asleep, it’s a thing to wake up. If you’re awake late, it’s a thing to go to sleep. If you’re talking, it’s not nothing to ease up. And if silent (or rendered silent), it takes a certain recalibration to find your voice again. Rather than painting this ability or unusual effort as something brash and macho, I’m relating this direction-shifting energy — this kind of ability — to patience: a certain intelligent relation to, even healthy distance from, what inertia would keep us in thrall to. It involves an alert (but not tense) waiting. In other places, I’ve been known to call it relaxation.

Patience, then, is neither always a letting-be of how things are, nor a noisy rousing to shake things up, but rather an unlikely capacity in the vicinity of which things might genuinely change direction. A nuanced effort, but not a clichéd effortfulness. As I like to say: practitioners are those who are trained in the art of transition. (We can account for why, but it’d take more time than we have in this essay.) Practitioners — those who intentionally organise themselves around devotions and fidelities that bear a non-relation to productive-categories of the current moment — know both how not to squander effort and also some serious things about time.

Impatience, then, might be what rears up when “we” want — read: inertia (impersonally) wants — to keep going in the same direction that you, they and we’ve always gone, even when circumstances are urgently pressing us to consider another. Impatience — I’m telling you — is perhaps allergic to change, not for it. Impatience is the distracting cover-story. It disguises the fact that we’re under-equipped for doing a certain thing right now. Things like: accepting a difference; pausing before deciding; resisting a habit of self-terrorising; admitting we just don’t know ourselves or the future. Stuff like that, and more (which you are well-qualified to inventory).

(Telling the difference between when one is impatient and when something in one’s world is actually urgent is a fine art. People who don’t want change will also tend to deride as “impatient” those on the side of urgency. A sleazy manoeuvre that can confuse the best of us for a wee moment.)

This resistance to change is, at the same time, bound up with objective bodily mechanisms. Pertaining as it does to the function we can dub “the liver”[i] (for Traditional Chinese Medicine and other modalities) impatience and its sibling state, frustration, are sparked or generated by rhythm changes or hindrances, and definitely by too many inconsistent changes. Choppy eye motions during a traffic jam can make us liverish. So can multi-tasking all-day, everyday, or rampant changes of plans happening all at once, with no absorption time. Or YouTube surfing, or being stopped when you were on a roll. Or having a certain anticipation of what’s going to happen, and life being different. You can find your own examples and apply the principle.

The liver-function’s contribution to things, at the same time, is that — when it happens to run smoothly — it assists with following-through (aka: sticking power). This can be when following-through is a good thing, but it can also be our ability to follow-through on folly, when it’s daft. The liver (of the wood element) is that aspect within us that can keep on with things; it’s the tone of having a direction or robust impetus. It’s our organ for tenacity. When trained and treated well, this function might remain in-tune, meaning tenacity doesn’t become bullying and waiting doesn’t become torpor.

When the liver is working, we can decide to do things (with adequate patient, waiting time) and then (supported by a harmonious system more generally) deliver on those decisions. This Delivering-On could be for me or you — each as a discrete being — but also for ourselves as connected profoundly to other beings: doing the dishes; showing up the next morning after a drunken offer to help move a fridge; remaining in a slightly less-fun scenario because it contributes to something important and bigger than just-you; listening (even when what’s being discussed doesn’t, say, “validate” us). What comes to mind is the old-fashioned notion of “character”. The yoga texts mention a quality called: the ability to bear “the pairs of opposites”. It’s perhaps that stretch in the organism, in its very matter, that equates to less jumpiness, less reactivity. Steady, but not stuck.

You don’t just end up with it, through time and vain hopefulness. You sort of train it. Yeah. And in the small moments of each person’s life, I’d be curious to ponder the ways in which one either undermines or cultivates it. Where and how, for example, did the famous land rights activist Vincent Lingiari train the composure he was well known for?

To accommodate changes, to be able to manage those too (since life involves them), one needs a smooth functioning liver. A liver that we don’t tax too much with stuff it hates or stuff which drains it. We can arguably squander our Transitioning Powers. We can wear out that juicy elasticity by transitioning from some messenger to some other messenger and back again, via the weather app that has the animated rain clouds, and then to the calendar app, and then to the socials, followed by the betting app, the lingerie link, the fitness tracker. (The apps say they offer tools for enabling us at the surface, but also these very tools might undo this capacity at another level.) When the liver works — when we haven’t frittered its genius — we can stick to things and also transition. Stick and Move. Wait until it’s the moment. Timeliness of action, say the Taoists.

Urgency, then, is not to be conflated with impatience. Sounding-similar, but unrelated, it could be understood as a flavour of temporality — not hurried, without haste — which attends-to, which accompanies, that which deserves our attention, and that for which it might be worth waiting, and then acting. Urgency requires what the impatient don’t have time or stretch for. When I’m impatient, I resist transition and am full of irritation with the idea that some things really deserve some urgency and (ergo) that change might be waiting in the wings. In impatient modes, I’m really in a hurry to keep us on track to Business as Usual, to the Scintillating Sameness of Faux-Novelty. There are many ornate and clever ways to insist on and defend this profound species of impatience. Things like “efficiency”, or improving “productivity”, and something I’ll go on about below.

The impatience which I wanted to track, way back at the gurgling conception of this essay, was the kind of impatience that shuts down the slow, dangerous and often-gauche pondering that precedes serious change. This impatience — that many of us know and experience regularly (inside ourselves or around us) — is often about ensuring that we never do, think, feel or become anything different. And, on the way to becoming or doing anything different(ly), we will pass for a moment via uncertainties, unknowingness, even via what, too-often, gets dubbed as a certain ilk of anxiety.

You can see why it has been said that patience is a kind of virtue, and that this old saying isn’t even a platitude. Patience = a wisdom in relation to time and a studied knack with rhythm. Not quite the opposite of impatience (which needn’t have an opposite), patience would be something we can. Aristotle, and other ancients, I believe, had the notion of continence (enkratia) and the yogis have bramacharya. I’m less charmed by the accounts of these that go via a “self-mastery” kind of talk, but I am curious about the disposition that would account for it as the ability to “contain” (continence). For me, it’s most useful as idea when I think of it as one’s “vessel” being able not to splurt out of itself all the time. Funnily enough, I recently was alerted to the etymology of the term “capacity”, which of course relates to “containment”[ii]! Impatience is a kind of splurting. Our little huffs. Our eye-rolls at others. Our hurrying words. Our compulsive topplings of bad logic and associations. Our moments of pressing others to fix our bad feelings. All of these (when not merely the rote-learnt techniques of hegemonic masculinity or micro-domination more generally) are also signs of low capacity. It’s difficult, sure: this continence business. Waiting is not an absence of action. It is an active capacity.

Urgency, I want to say, asks us to train ourselves for transition. Being able to transition, in fact, requires a training that looks very much like bouts of patient, active waiting. Like discerning uses and conservings of energy and effort. Staying with something that matters, something that can unnerve us, and without dogmatism. (If you feel like reading an excellent Ode to Boredom, see David Foster Wallace’s account of it, and praise of it, in The Pale King. Set in the Internal Revenue Service of the US, Wallace, I believe, wanted to write something in the most boring of all imaginable places. Of course, what emerges is anything but. Furthermore, there is a section where he describes the state of boredom as a kind of gateway into bliss, into other states of being alive. He also states unambiguously that if you can handle extreme boredom, if your capacity stretches to that (ah … patience?), then there is literally nothing you cannot achieve).

So, let me state this slowly: We practise patience so that we might be capable of meeting that which is urgent.

“Meeting” is a prim way of saying “not fumbling” that which is urgent.

This urgency I’m trying to sketch for you is not about being in a big, obfuscating, habitual hurry but could include the seriousness of all of history’s adjacent and co-existing temporalities. All the unwritten histories. Histories that simmer under the dominant accounts of What Happened, What Should Happen, What can be Acknowledged as Having Happened, What Could be Deemed Happen-able. Time isn’t monolithic. It’s got texture, layers, leaps and non-sequiturs, which evade overbearing histories and our (nasty, misguided, naïve) urges to master the Whole Story.

Patience and urgency thus share a camaraderie, and impatience and stasis (even if they don’t look like it at first) are cut from an arguably similar cloth.

Now … There’s this thing I get impatient and intolerant about, distressed even. And, given our discussions just now, I’m curious as to whether I’m impatient about it, or whether I feel an urgency in relation to it. I connect its phenomenon to some drop-out of wisdom, to some bad-thinking. I watch people blindly mobilising this idea, this talk-fashion, to relieve their suffering, and I suspect it is either broadly ineffectual, or worse: that it encourages what it purports to fix. Having established the outlines of this essay, above, maybe it’s the moment to digress into Antonia’s Bafflement with the Fashion of Presentness. Since this is an essay — and this is how essays can work — of course, the arguments above are going to dovetail with this apparently benign and offhand rant below.

[cue transition]

I never cease to be dismayed at how insistently people mobilise the notion of The Present as a cipher for some kind of Safe Haven, some kind of Sure Thing, as the attitudinal solution: the “right” way to be (temporally). Take my word for it: you’ll hear it said (you’ve said it, right?) in a vast number of scenes, demographics and circumstances. Among the TikTok addicted, hanging with the hippies, at the niche gallery opening, by earnest, fastidious hipsters, at your mother’s when their best friend is over, in the most corporate of meetings, late at night over wine and a relationship intervention. We could point the contemporaneous finger — willy-nilly — at the New Age (but that’s a shifting landscape right now), to the poorly trained yoga teacher, to the well-trained yoga teacher, to the person who did a Mindfulness course once that work paid for, to someone who wants to sound pious to themselves in their own head, to certain well-meaning, but daftish, therapy modes, to insidious Wellness-Speak, to perhaps poor translations of Eastern texts, to radio shows about Calmness, to people to whom the current structural ClusterFuck is very unkind, but who compliantly blame themselves and who have absorbed the big furphy that it’s a lack of “presence” that accounts for their malaise. Or we could go much further back, to Parmenides, and the like.

The Jewish-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida luckily, provided a far more nuanced (less tetchy) take on the issue. Reading Derrida, incidentally, also takes a lot of patience. His prose requires the work of waiting. Somehow it provides a field in which to shift your rhythm of thinking, your otherwise dot-pointed, Somethingorother for Idiots-version of thought. His work overall makes you take your time and people have hounded him for it.

I read him with a group of people — for whom I came to care very much — over many years. We’d meet weekly and bring along our snacks and our Not-Really-Getting-It. We saw the latter as a good sign. It took a while, you see, to twig to what he was on about, to what kind of training it was. He really thought about the presence question a lot, and instead of complaining about it (like I do). He read very closely the way the concept, trend and tendency to valorise “presentness” saturated so many texts of the Western Canon. (You see it’s not “new”, this present-emphasis; it’s been around, and best not viewed as any kind of epiphanic arrival when your own mouth starts spouting it compulsively with a dram of righteousness.)

It’s the saying of it … I thought to myself as I dozed this morning. It’s the way we say it, to ourselves and each other. Is that the bit, I mused horizontally, that’s most troubling? It’s often delivered to us as an impatient mantra, disguised as bad wisdom, only looking like care. A friend is tired of our current neurotic predicament, and to wind things up says: maybe you just need to be more present. What they mean is: can we stop talking about this, since you haven’t moved on it in, like, decades …? Perhaps being-present is advice dressed up as patience, but is really a vehicle for our impatience with each other. Impatience with the fact that we continue to suffer, to see people we love suffer, and that this is mostly how we are and how we might continue to be.

Back to Derrida: one can read him as saying all this Present-Stuff is Classical, Metaphysical, Modes of Disguised Domination. A tricksy sleight of hand wherein we impose a simplified fantasy and slingable slogan on a moving, complex reality. At the start of his work Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta has a nice quote on complexity. He writes:

There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern … but recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity … the war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity. (2019: 3–4)

Though I wouldn’t wish to collapse the complex differences between Yunkaporta’s and JD’s thinking, I see our widespread allergies to complexity as resonating with their concerns, and the invitation to dwell longer with ideas, things and emergent possibilities as resonant in their respective positions. We’re in a hurry to get somewhere much worse, apparently, and who needs intricate notions, patterns and understandings to slow down our enthusiastic arrival?

The present, says JD, in the (dominant) traditions of (a mostly) Western Metaphysics, and in the habits of thinking that we’ve absorbed indiscriminately, has always aligned Being with Fullness, with Self-Presence, with fantasies of the One, and of undercooked notions of Wholeness. It’s a load of pleasant-sounding, spurious doxa — or (less stridently): it tends to make conceptual, and then real, trouble. It can be used to justify bloodbaths and dominations, to shut people and cultures up and — surprise-surprise — if you zero-in on its rhetoric and habits, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. (As I try to tell my students at the university, if you do gender theory you’re using Derrida, if you’re interested in the project of decolonisation, or anticolonisation, you may be using, or at least be not-undermined by Derrida’s work. He didn’t start these urgent and on-going revolutions, but he provided some good scaffolding for arguing in white contexts about the issues.)

But who wants scrutiny? We’re primed to prefer a slogan, apparently (even if it doesn’t really help us). The Present remains a perennially popular slogan, much to my chagrin and exasperation. People throw it around all the time! Why? dear god … thinking they’ll get a tick from the Thought Police, thinking we’re helping ourselves? The Be-Present bit of Life Advice could be about telling others that an unease (in the space, in the history, at issue) isn’t really valid, but rather the solution (to their own unease with the unease) is to spurt out this Demented Thing. Have you tried Being More Present? FFS! Can someone start admitting that it doesn’t work, or that it’s a bad fashion, worse than puffas and compression pants. When we spurt it out, I truly wonder whether the real work it does is shutting down discomfort, silencing the fact that life is quite a challenge. (Ontologically, it’s quite a challenge. Life mostly doesn’t feel like a scrubbed bathroom with a scented candle.) And thus, summoning this empty and wildly inaccurate bit of temporal Mansplaining is of zero usefulness.

Now, if you happen to find yourself in a temporal layer or nappe (as Bergson called it) which is less colonised by past-obsessiveness, and less full of faux-future expectancy, just keep it to yourself. If you sloganise it, you’ll make it immediately imprecise and a lot annoying.

The Present-Mantra, like a bad diet plan, is never blamed for not delivering on its hype. We blame ourselves. Maybe I had too many of the celery shakes? Apart from its being ruinous for careful thinking, one of my main reasons for distrusting all the Presence-Talk is that it becomes a New Way to be Not Good Enough. Naturally we’re provided many ways to feel like this, which we can take up, or not. But being-present is a sneaky one. It sounds innocuous. It’s a basic concept that isn’t very clever. Simple solutions to your problems often aren’t. (Blenders and green vegetables notwithstanding.)

The idea that time is simplistically three-fold and that, among its options, the Present is the Right Place to be in it, reeks of a smug or desperate way to manage a big, messy, gorgeous and difficult life, one in which we could take an interest beyond our Tidy Little Presents. My present, let me break it to you, isn’t particularly special, which doesn’t make me disavow it, or disdain it, flee it in anticipation etc. It’s just what it is. (I can align with its vibe and depart its vibe … if I’m functioning.) The present is the definition (often) of a kind of Ordinariness in which we — if we are not traumatised, with PTSD or C-PTSD etc. — are well-stocked[iii].

I recall Bergson saying that the Present basically equates to the Body. (And I love “body” stuff, but not only.) In other words: this meat (bone, skin, fat, sinew), now. The mode of the present, of habit, of the body as it meets what’s up ahead, can tend to be an instrumentalist one (not necessarily “spiritual”, as the slogan has it). Bergson, in Matter and Memory (1991: 66), speaks of utility. We filter out what isn’t apparently useful and the mechanism that filters doesn’t have your expansive aliveness in view but rather a more survival, or use-based, outlook. This present (and I don’t know what other one everyone gushes about) is very Snip-Snap, and thus too uptight for any proper pastness, any drifty reminiscence or involuntary memory. Its mode is ignorant of a deep, relaxed or immemorial past that we would honour, listen to, learn from or cherish. It’s also too anxious and pre-empting to give enough space for a past we’d re-read, critique and endeavour not to repeat. This mode of time, as I understand Bergson, is highly attuned to what is merely useful now. And Now’s Terms aren’t that great … (Can you see the problem?)

In terms of this being-in-the-present business, we are basically programmed (by our Western history) to read it, to code it, as good. Even the very smart, bright, attentive and discerning can miss that they are brainwashed on the issue of its validity. Derrida tracked this in authors that he loved and admired; he tried to point out the obsession, gently but firmly.

The present isn’t particularly exciting, and it is practical. We do need to be able to inhabit this inflection of time, well-enough, while not getting stuck there or making it any kind of existential or (golly) ethical answer. The present, which philosopher Gilles Deleuze, riffing off Bergson, will link with habit, coalesces in the same way that habit itself coalesces. (If you dig into it patiently the same mechanisms are in play). We are our habits, in this present that he articulates very nicely. We are both the ease (the continuity of tasks, smoothness of known doings and manoeuvres, the selves that we recognise) and the stuck-ness-es which are the inevitable flipsides of these (we languish in routine, presumptuousness, self-(dis)satisfaction). Philosopher Helen Ngo writes about racism phenomenologically in relation to habit. Habit and the present, remember, are closely linked. Racism as being in the body, hovering between conscious and non-conscious registers. In The Habits of Racism, she writes: “bodily habits are at each moment laden with the histories that precede them, while at the same time, beholding and foreclosing possibilities of new ones to follow.” (2017: 5, emphasis added) This present, I’d argue, might be your mean-spirited savings account for your racist orientations and dispositions. But, you might cry, being-present is about disrupting these! It will set us free. That’s why we strive for it and obey earnestly when some smug Bro on a podcast tells us to “Be More Present”.

I promise I am not making fun of you; I’m not making fun of us. But I am putting my foot down. Derrida accounts for why the present is so ingrained in us. (He’s so much more patient than I am. He wrote thousands of pages to help us “get” why the present, simplistically banged on about, is no way out.) We can harass partners with the complaint that they aren’t Being Present. (Perhaps they feel love and are distracted a lot. Perhaps, what we mean is that they lack sticking power. Perhaps they are captured by the rapacious mechanisms of techocapitalism. Perhaps, they are feeling nothing. Perhaps they can only approach intimacy sideways. Perhaps their entitlement is a handicap. Perhaps they feel interest and shame in a mix they can’t account for. Perhaps when you say it, you’re really complaining about your own complex feelings. I don’t know.) Maybe we could just experience how love misses and arrives at the same time without using that whiney admonition about the present.

The present never delivers what its branding promises. We are always here and not here: distributed across vast elsewheres, in space and time. This combination of temporalities, of time-flavoured differences is no character flaw. It is arguably pathological and narrow, to be only, or mostly, present. It would make any of us intolerable. Sociability (which I value, by the way) requires an ability to shift between kinds of time (to remember, in the narratives we share; to envisage, in the ways we see ourselves together in on-going ways; to interrupt, so that we can become unknown to ourselves …) And patience, I’d suggest, is being relaxed in the face of a future that isn’t decided yet, and times that can’t be domesticated to one dominant mode.

This is the other problem with the present: its narrow-minded, overly-anxious take on the future. Ngo’s quote above hints at this. It beholds and forecloses. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Gilles Deleuze explains the notion that if we take the option of dividing time into three ostensible modes — past, present and future — then each of these modes has its own version of the other two.

So, it’s not really about whether you’re in the present, as such. If you were only “in it”, then you’d anyway be exposed to its related flavours of its “past” and its “future” modes. Its past is a “just-gone”. The practical day as it moves along and slips by. Its so-called “future” is basically anticipatory. It’s a difficult flavour for many, and the thanklessness of a certain anticipation is what I suspect people want to get out of so often. This explains, as my partner clarified when reading a draft of this essay, the fashion of clinging to the slogan of “being present”. We want to be relieved of an aspect of the present! Presentness (which is a package deal), however, keeps us there — in the present, with its future mode of anticipation which has an icky and moreish flavour. We need a wholly more informed notion of time, to get out of this terrific bind.

The present’s future mode is full of expectancy — things opened and foreclosed on the basis of habit, following Ngo’s wording. This futurity is not wild, unforeseen, open or necessarily just. Anticipation is a Know-It-All; it’s sure it has a handle on what’s coming, and as much as it might Keep Us Keeping On, it works awfully well to persuade us to remain the same. Anticipation has its place; it’s just a tedious manager. (You foresee doing laundry and thus have clean knickers; you make the bus on time.) Like a very “present” parent who, out of an anticipatory worry, tends to reply with: what’s that gonna do for your life? Best keep things the same, or you might be disappointed. Or, another related kind of horrible mentoring: only ever rewarding and validating Faster and More. That kind of advice.

To anticipate, rigorously considered, is to extrapolate forwards off the basis of the limitations, the utility, filterings-out and privilegings typical of this present. The present’s “future” reproduces its logics into its own brand of weak futurity. If I’m being provocative, I’d say anticipation is a pseudo-future (and that it’s all the future you’re gonna get if you keep up this obsession with the present). If the present — for Deleuze, and I reckon he’s right — is the time of habit, then the present’s (pseudo-)future can never be anything but a logical extension of what you have right now, what you know already, of yourself as you have come to believe yourself to be, or have been told you are. This kind of future is skimpy. It’s a celery-shake kind of future. Not really a future at all. In it, you’re likely to replicate even the very things you despise, or which you can see aren’t great.

(I want to wonder, charitably, what my very smart friends mean when they slip in a casual So, I was trying to be present … into an account of their days. I think what they might mean, or what we could mean together, is that they are trying for a moment to abstain from assuming that they know. Know what’s coming, know what their kid is like, know how such things always turn out. Maybe that’s what we mean with this slogan. Is it? This stance isn’t really about time, it’s about epistemology.)

Have you had enough of my Complaint about the Present? It wasn’t even a proper anecdote, as in, a story. Where’s the juicy personal gossip to upholster my argumentative intention here? If you’re going to stick with this essay about impatience, then surely you are going to need something to spice it up.

Okay. This is the story.

Once I had a good whack of writing sitting with a publisher. This work had been sitting with them for some years. A dear friend, who was only trying, out of loyalty and care, to champion me (and in their place I’d probably do the same) was encouraging me to put my foot down, to let this sluggish publisher know what-was-what. You can’t just treat authors like nothing. You can’t sit on people’s intellectual property for years with no word. No word!

For some reason, I didn’t feel rushed. In this case, it was not Aristotle’s notion of continence, since it wasn’t my “holding in” impatience, behaving otherwise than my impulse. My impulse just wasn’t in a hurry. I can’t explain why. Maybe it was a lack of ambition. Who knows? And in other circumstances, arguably, the delay could have been to my disadvantage (and as a white, privileged-enough person, would anyone particularly care?). Sure, it could have been something I lived to resent, something that harmed me structurally. Sure. And: it took the time it took. Without self-consciously waiting, I waited.

Not long after this cup-of-tea coaching session, I heard from said-publisher. The work was accepted, and they sincerely apologised for taking so long. Someone central to the process had lost a close and too-young family member to an acute illness. The delay was in part due to this tragedy.

As you can imagine, I’m quite glad that I hadn’t — in a performance of impatient “ambition”, an achievement tantrum — told them what-was-what. That’s the story. An utterly irrelevant one in the scheme of important things, but there you go.

It’s not news to note that we (collectively) critique entitlement at one level, but then we still reward its sibling behaviours. Entitlement and achievement-tantrumming — they’re not so far off. The latter is impatience in full flight. The inability to hear, listen, bear or ruminate. The grimy quest for wholeness and perfection. To eradicate the lack. (Do you see how I’m bundling these?) A small human, under a certain age, who’s prone to tantrums makes sense. They don’t have much continence yet; they can’t hold things — disappointment, sadness, outrage, separations, exhaustion, hunger, unease, energy — in. Their vessel isn’t “cooked” enough, like a ceramic pot before it goes in the kiln. Their capacity is emergent, but not established.

We may be tempted just to reward loud and imposing ways of being, because we’re a bit scared: of the loud child, of the boss who talks over you even more cheerily if you don’t quite agree, of the topplings of a sulk. We do reward kids sometimes for stuff that might not be best coded to an encouraging response because parents are damn tired, because at some point, we theorise, the rewarding will stop and later we will get clear about what-is-what. But later, when that kid is a thirty-something line-manager with litres of yeasty arrogance, we have a bad habit of continuing (out of kyriarchical exhaustion, perhaps) to keep on rewarding it. Or not to Un-reward it sternly or nonchalantly enough.

Australian politics. The last decades.

Impatient people with actually very nice lives, and quite a lot of security. People in power threatening tantrums or having them. Some mishaps of listening. Rewards (or a lack of accountability) for Real Bad Behaviour. (That’s the paragraph. Yep, that’s it.)

Impatience + Politics.

This is where this essay really started — as I sat at dinners, at bars, at extended family gatherings, listening (I didn’t know it then) for the difference between impatience and urgency. I heard a lot of the former. And, as my partner and I steered the hire-car along the highways of Queensland in a muscular humidity, to a domino line of black and yellow signs, I felt truly afraid. Because I feared that this tendency, this habit of Impatience-with-Everything-Not-Staying-the-Same, would win out.

I’ve often seen impatience going along with a poo-pooing of risks. Speaking loudly and fast, this impatience always has an obvious, common-sensical answer to the ready. Whole radio stations, newspapers, internet outlets, apps and other trainings are dedicated to its guffawing sensibility. To it, any tentative Trying Out of Something Not Quite Finished, a Future in the Delicate-Making, is simply … uh, like, embarrassing. You’ll come off like a dickhead, goes the caution of the Impatient. This kind of political impatience, or Impatience-as-Politics, gives in to the grimness of only the present, while acting as if this surrender were anything-but. It takes years, I’ve found, to spot the difference between this toughness and genuine strength. The cool, the cynical, those mired in clever scepticism, the quipful and so on — it’s mostly a cover for a lack of capacity. The word magnanimity comes to mind, as a quality/mode that bears zero relation to impatience and its fob-offs.

The poses of concealed resignation. Loud, quiet, snobby, too-certain — in any case, they’re always quite afraid. And merely verbally aligning yourself with what you consider the “good” or “correct” side of politics is not going to insulate you from this probable human tendency to drift towards impatience. If you want to be more effective (or even just a smidge consistent) politically, then training your ability to respond well to urgency, to curb the untrained mode that is static impatience, is — I think — a pressing question, one site for serious engagement.

The impatient person in us would prefer a certain known future to the vulnerability of wanting something better for everyone, withstanding these quieter and more substantial transitions. Philosopher Alain Badiou will speak of this vulnerability as daring to risk being the Dupe. We must risk it. And we can’t guarantee our image in the process. When I’m impatient, underneath my bluster, I’m a little bit bleak. Somewhere beneath all the attitude, Impatience veils Nervousness. This nervousness can sap the sticking power (which Badiou calls obstinacy) needed for the slow, steady actioning that urgency asks of us.

But what about transitions? Where did that thread go? Didn’t you say, AP, that patience could be a training which somehow undergirded an ability to transition, or that (from the other side) impatience was a difficulty with transition?

I sure did, and you’re very alert.

A friend of mine once translated my term “transition” (which I get from yoga but which is applicable in umpteen places) into psychoanalytical-speak as “separation”. To transition is to leave something behind (to risk a loss, temporarily or longer-term) in order to embark on something ahead (unknown, and therefore risking again, but also opening to a future … little ones, day to day, or larger ones). You gotta let go of your parent’s arm in order to meet your best friend at kindy. (Freud’s grandson threw the cotton reel and recovered it — over and over. He was doing rudimentary trainings in transition, in separation.) A transition always involves a kind of wobbly instant between one thing and the next. Its scary in-between-ness cannot be avoided. You might look ungainly as you transition. (Think: banana peels. Think: puberty.) But you can also look beautiful. (Think: the outline of your indistinct form, clambering onto a bus to somewhere new. Your awkward and not-at-all movie-worthy gestures of desire facing someone who you cannot be sure will reciprocate, and who you cannot be sure won’t).

You can only be beautiful once you’ve waited some things out. Once you’ve encountered loss and risk and have dared some un-indemnified courage. Otherwise, you’re just Insta-able. Anticipation, bless its cotton-socks, would just like you not to have to lose face. Prediction or anticipation would have us create the present we know (already) over and over.

Now, I am giving this bad habit I call Overvaluing the Idea of the Present quite a bit of stick, but I don’t wish to make light of what might drive us to hope that it would fix things. Maybe we turn to the present as cure-all because we are often afraid or very tired, and it would be good if there were an immediate and un-inconveniencing solution, one that wouldn’t ruffle our humdrum at all. We might wish for a kind of summons via a word (like presence) that would spell a magical shift without having to work with the slowly-learned patience that urgency requires … Yep. But, nah.

When someone says to us “be present” (which they — haha — should absolutely stop doing), they might be trying to say that in the inertia of our situation, in its momentum to keep on with what we anticipated, we could do well to pause a little minute, to know that we won’t perish if our entitlements, presumptions and habits-of-being are made to wait. Waiting asks nothing of us. It just says: relax and stay awake. This “staying awake” has a tripartite structure — it’s about relaxing into the three modes of time at once. One is so relaxed that it’s possible to transition between pasts, presents, futures, and all their interwoven modes. As you can see, “be present” doesn’t convey the half of it. For Badiou it might involve an openness to “that which throws us outside of ourselves, through the flaming rings of prediction.” (2009: 42). Prediction. Anticipation. Impatience. Leap clear!

If there were one time-slogan, one magic term or “mode”, that could band-aid all these questions, it wouldn’t anyway be great: it’d be scary. Luckily, there isn’t one word and there isn’t even a series of words. Often, there’s the work of waiting in urgency, the obstinate trainings of patience and forgetting of the selves we know too well, the work of decisive action and of navigating transition, its losses, strange grace and terrors, in relation to something that matters. There’s risking looking like a dickhead quite often, but slowly — quite slowly — being less of one.

References

Alain Badiou, 2009, Conditions, Bloomsbury Continuum, London & New York.

Henri Bergson, 2005, Matter and Memory, Zone Books, Brooklyn.

Gilles Deleuze, 2004, Difference and Repetition, Bloomsbury Continuum, London & New York.

Helen Ngo, 2017, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment, Lexington Books, Langham.

David Foster Wallace, 2012, The Pale King, Penguin Random House Australia, Melbourne.

[i]  Don’t get this confused with the meaty bundle called the “liver” from a Western anatomical perspective. That would be over-simplifying things — a conceptual false-friend. This notion is about a function, rather than a discrete organ, as such. (Of course, “organ” implies something that organises, which the liver-function does … it might be thought of as one pattern of organisation among many in the body.)

[ii] My thanks to artist and scholar Gabrielle Amodeo for that connection.

[iii] I offer this caveat because in some ways the present can be harder to access (as in: its easy habitudes, and continuity) for those who have experienced various kinds of trauma. I still wouldn’t advise anyone in that position to over-value (conceptually) this presentness stuff, but I would say that the present (as habit, as bodily inhabiting) may also be something worth cultivating, along with other temporal modes and ways. As my psychologist friend says, the traumatised, like anyone, want a reliable present, but also want a (or many) future(s).