By Pinky Concha-Colmenares
Published Jan 22, 2026 12:04 am | Updated Jan 21, 2026 06:12 pm
Patience is not one of my virtues but I lived with it because — as my mother used to say — it is a normal part of life. I discovered that including the time for waiting — and bringing something to do — tamed impatience.
Yes, waiting used to be a normal part of life. It was inconvenient, sometimes frustrating, but usually accepted. Today, waiting is viewed as inefficiency or even injustice.
We wait five seconds for a webpage to load and we complain the internet is slow! We refresh messages repeatedly, wondering why someone hasn’t replied when we know that replies can be instant. Somewhere along the way, whatever patience one had quietly slipped out of our daily vocabulary.
Life before Wi-Fi moved at a different pace. If you had a question, you didn’t “Google” it. You asked someone who might know, checked a book, or waited until you could get to a library. If you needed an official document, you physically went to a government office, filled out forms by hand, and waited your turn. Sometimes you were told to come back another day. And you did. There was no social media to complain about poor service.
There were no tracking numbers to check every hour, no “typing…” bubbles, no delivery riders racing against app timers. Information took time to arrive, and so did answers. Waiting was built into the process.
Oddly, age has taught me that slowness had benefits. When you waited, you prepared yourself for the wait. You brought a book, a newspaper, or simply learned how to sit still. You talked to strangers in lines. You observed people. You learned how to manage boredom, which is now almost extinct. Today, in any waiting line, people’s eyes are on their gadgets, they do not even notice who is beside them.
Today, technology has shortened waiting times but also shortened our tolerance. The problem isn’t convenience—it’s expectation. We now expect everything to be fast, seamless, and immediate. When it isn’t, we feel wronged — and feel we have the right to complain loudly — and insult a person, company or government agency in social media.
Consider government transactions. While many services are now online—and rightly so—there is something instructive about the old system. You planned your day around it. You knew delays were part of the process. You didn’t assume efficiency; you adjusted to reality. The waiting, as tedious as it was, taught patience and perspective.
The same goes for communication. Before messaging apps, you waited for phone calls, letters, or in-person conversations. Silence wasn’t automatically interpreted as disinterest or disrespect. People had lives offline, and everyone understood that. Now, delayed replies — especially at times when ordinary people commute, lunch break or are with family — can trigger anxiety, irritation, or unnecessary assumptions.
We — and most of the world — consider waiting as something to avoid at all costs. We multitask through it, distract ourselves from it, or complain loudly about it. Rarely do we sit with it.
But time has taught me that waiting, uncomfortable as it may be, teaches valuable lessons. It reminds us that not everything is under our control. It forces us to slow down, even briefly. It creates space—for thought, reflection, and sometimes understanding.
There’s also a certain humility in waiting your turn. In lines, in traffic, in systems that don’t bend to personal schedules, waiting reminds us that we are part of a larger whole. That lesson feels increasingly rare in a world designed around personalization and speed.
Faster services, digital access, and instant communication have undeniably improved daily life. But something has been lost along the way: our ability to be still without frustration, to accept delays without outrage, to understand that not everything happens on demand.
Perhaps patience, like any skill, needs practice. We can start small—by resisting the urge to refresh a page repeatedly, by allowing a message to sit unanswered without taking it personally, by treating waiting time not as wasted time but as neutral time.
Waiting patiently does not mean settling for inefficiency or excusing poor service. It simply means recognizing that life does not always move at the speed of our devices. And maybe it shouldn’t. (Email: pinky.colmenares@mb.com.ph)
