They say that patience is the ability to idle your motor, while in reality you feel like stripping your gears and throwing it all overboard.
It is perhaps the greatest virtue we can train ourselves to have, because with patience comes calmness, fewer rash decisions, less frustration and an acceptance that we cannot rush time although we might want to.
Normally, we want time to slow down, so that every day feels like 60 hours instead of the the 24 of which we sleep maybe a third. For those who feel like last year was a lost year instead of a different year, time is a very important matter. To look back at a time when so much was cancelled and postponed seems like wasted time, but there is no experience in life that is really wasted on us.
Now, there are many of who are wishing that time speeds up, so that our children can go back to the socialisation and satisfaction of school; so that employees can get back to work and feel worthwhile and fulfilled again. There are many of us who are wishing that time flies ahead to the weeks and months until we are protected against this variant of the virus.
In ten day’s time or so, the over 85s in the community who have lived in fear and in isolation to the detriment of their physical and mental health for almost a year, will see the green shoots of possibility again. A possibility that will allow them to integrate sensibly with family and friends and community.
To that age group, time is everything, but the time between now and their vaccine is within reaching distance and inside a fortnight, that campaign will be well underway.
For everybody else, the waiting game goes on and the tensions involved in this spilled over into political tension last weekend. An unwelcome consequence of tension and incompetence and insensitivity.
I am confident that the number of vaccines that will come into this country before summer will be in the millions and that the programme will ramp up accordingly, so that some form of freedom and liberty will be within all our means. But it will be a liberty that we will have to treat with respect and not with the wild abandon visited upon us all for that allegedly meaningful Christmas.
The numbers of those hospitalised in our region are beginning to come down, and all the indications are that we are on the downward side of the hill that was the current wave.
If we are to listen and respect those who work on the frontlines, and if we are to respect and honour those who gave up so much last year, we have to stay firm, stay compliant so that we get to that promised land of mid summer alive and well, to enjoy the fruits of life, and to honour those who have been denied that privilege.
