Patience was born from our inability to control much in our lives. Now, as technology urges us to speed up, patience is an act of self-determination
When you take a class with the Harvard University art historian Jennifer Roberts, your first task is always to choose a work of art, then go and look at it, wherever it’s displayed, for three full hours. Three hours! If that notion doesn’t horrify you at least a little, I suspect you’re atypical: in our impatient, accelerated age, the mere thought of it is sufficient to trigger an irritable jumpiness. (Stick me in front of a painting for three hours and I’d soon be swiping my thumb on it downwards, to see if there had been any updates.) Roberts knows this: the whole point, she writes, is that it’s “a painfully long time”. She doesn’t expect her students to spend it all in rapt attention; rather, the goal is to experience that jumpiness, tolerate it, and get through it – whereupon they see things in the artwork they’d never have imagined were there.
Increasingly, it feels as if impatience dominates our lives – by which I suppose I mean my life – in subtle and troubling ways. Take a newly published study by the management scholar Ernesto Reuben and colleagues, in which participants were offered a choice between a cheque today, or a larger cheque in two weeks’ time. In keeping with past research, about two-thirds chose the smaller, sooner reward. But here’s the twist: more than half of those people then waited more than two weeks to cash the cheque, even when the amounts involved were more than £100. They might as well have waited for more money.
Continue reading...
from Health & wellbeing | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1Pq2OhA
via health
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire