are we there yet?
patience has left the building
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone” - Blaise Pascal
I walk through my old neighborhood in NYC and see tall, boxy apartment buildings crop up on every other block seemingly overnight (I lived in one). A creator calls them Temu Towers or Ikea Skyscrapers. The fast fashion of architecture.
Design, I like to think, tells a story about a time, the people, and what was important to those people. Is our design story one of impatience?
I think about the sheer quantity and rate of things being produced — buildings, clothing, content. It seems we’re bursting at the seams.
But it exceeds the buildings that surround us and the objects that fill them. The structures are merely mirrors of our values and practices towering over us. It begins with the design of our days, our conversations, our thinking. From the language we use, the pace we move, to the intention at the center.
Is it beautiful? Or is it frantic and grabby?
I appreciate this perspective Addison Rae shared in an interview with apple music on how the rapid churn of content (be it music or otherwise) is diluting our worth and the worth of the work. Art, work, creation — call it what you’d like — needs to be digested. It demands time and space to breathe. It asks to be revisited. Again. And again.
Which brings me to patience - a fierce weapon of self-devotion. I think of patience as the first cousin of endurance. These cousins make a resilient and dedicated duo anchored in care.
Lately, I’m getting comfortable with patience. Maybe it’s my quiet rebellion to the curse of 2x speed — rejecting the need to keep up with an increasingly impatient world by speeding up an already time-bound life. What I am interested in is a beautiful life. I’m comfortable working for it. I’m comfortable waiting for it. And I acknowledge that I’m also already in its building.
Patience, that if I make it to 90, I’ll have had a life of iteration, experimentation, error, refinement, and flow. I’ll have stories, personality, legacy, a refined taste. I’ll have lines on my face where my story will be visible, much like the rings of a tree.
A kind of architecture that will have been carved with hammer and chisel, not an electric stapler. I hope this for you, too.
Thank you for reading at the scenter. If this resonated, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber — your support allows me to continue pouring into this slower, time-stretched space. x Lorig
You write beautifully, and thoughtfully...we are taught that "patience is a virtue", but as you've expressed here, it is so much more than that.