Staring out the window: Thoughts on patience, chess, and nature

"You must have a lot of patience."

I hear this a lot, mostly from folks who know I play chess and who find out that a chess game at standard time controls can sometimes take 4-6 hours or more. They assume that I have some supernatural ability to focus. Of course, for people who really know me, they know that this is far from the truth. In fact, I'm constantly moving, rarely able to stay on a single task for very long, and my mind is almost always on something else. In fact, I've found that chess is an activity that defies patience because the situation is always changing, the need to think and rethink constant; it's only those who don't understand the complexity that find themselves becoming impatient.

I was struck by this today as I visited with a lady at the assisted living. She is 92-years-old and when I walked up she was working on a puzzle, sitting in the place she most often sits and gazing out the window. At 92-years old, this is most of what she does. I think some of us stuck in the busy-ness of life find that image rather unsettling, perhaps even sad. We wish she could be doing something more productive. We wish that she could be of more use to society. But firstly, I have to point out that she's happy. And more important still, she sees things that most of us do not. Today, she remarked on very specific things--the claws of a robin, the blades of grass, the movement of the wind over a pond. She noticed these things because she had what we would call patience.

But what she has is not patience at all. Like me, she is constantly doing new and different things--puzzles and games--even at 92 years of age. It doesn't take patience for her to gaze out the window. Instead, it takes a mind capable and willing to see all the minute details of a scene that most people would consider mundane. I imagine anybody could look out that window and remark on five or six things about the scenery, but this lady could tell you hundreds, perhaps thousands of details; all because creation was to her an enormously complex symphony of beautiful things. It didn't come to her because she was patient; instead, as she noticed more and more, she was becoming a more active participant in all that surrounded her. What we may perceive as inactivity was anything but.

You see, most of us are amateurs--whether chess-players or nature viewers--but this lady is a professional. To describe what she does as being patient only works from our point of view. To her mind, she is being active, and it shows in her descriptions of what she sees. The same can be said for chess or art of any kind. The participant does not wait patiently but processes internally; all the while taking in details that others miss. Maybe patience isn't so much an art as it is by-product of good thinking.