I recently attended a really terrific and very interesting luncheon. The conversation was fresh and informed (we were talking politics, of course) and the women were smart and funny. Yet, after the coffee, but well before anyone else seemed ready to get up, I was grumbling to myself: “I gotta get out of here! It’s enough already.” I was reminded of the anecdote told by Phil Donahue about Bella Abzug, a truly impatient woman. They were at a dinner honoring a group of Nobel Laureates, and as each one got up to speak, Bella listened for a few sentences and then whispered to Phil, “Good! Now sit down!”
I have always been a very impatient person, but recently I have noticed the familiar hissing reflex becoming activated in a whole new array of situations. Like all New Yorkers, I am exasperated waiting in line or to cross the street; now I am impatient when my husband won’t fast forward through age-old graphic opening to “Mystery!” And get this: I can no longer sit for both a hair cut and hair coloring on the same day. By the second hour in the chair I am squirming like a three-year-old.
What’s odd about this upsurge in impatience is that I am, at the same time, also becoming more patient about things that used to seem intolerable. Nowadays I go for the brake rather than the gas when the traffic light goes yellow. I am able to “hold for the next available representative” for minutes rather than seconds. I am willing to actually read directions for a new piece of equipment rather than plug it in and push all the buttons until something does something. When dicing vegetables, I even keep to small chops throughout rather than building to chunks as I rush to finish. And I am newly philosophical about how, in time, things in life – especially in the lives of my children – will “work themselves out.”
This recalibration is minor indeed, but is, I think, yet one more confirmation of the useful insight that none of us is “who we were – only older.” In the same way as we are reshuffling other life-long priorities – work and family, friendships and hobbies, dreams and discards – I feel the imperative to get things done as efficiently as humanly possible giving way to a different kind of impatience – to get on with my life. Like so much of the reinvention process, this adjustment is an intriguing mix of good news and bad news. I don’t particularly like the fact that it is getting harder to multi-task efficiently as I get older; on the other hand I very much do like the fact that I feel less compelled to manage everything for everyone else and more interested in getting on with my own life.
Psychologists point to a “mellowing” that occurs as we outgrow the more intense phase of adulthood, and I do feel better equipped to roll with the punches. Rather than letting time-management dictate my allocation of time as I have always done, I schedule my hair maintenance in a totally inefficient two-visit schedule that takes the pressure off. And if I want to move on a few minutes before an event winds down, who says I have to wait for someone else to be the first to leave? Mellowness, as I am experiencing it in ways large and small, is about how few things are all that big a deal.