Patience!

As some readers know, I begin the agenda of CTE’s weekly Management Group meetings with a parable or saying that is intended to raise issues or evoke thoughts that may be relevant to the work we do in CTE. Here is this week’s quotation.

Be patient. God isn’t finished with us yet.

Patience is our compassion for the distance between what we are now and what we know we can be. Because we have such fertile imaginations, we can envision ourselves scaling mountains one moment and swimming oceans the next. To get from the mountaintop to the beach, takes a certain amount of time. If we’re on the mountain and want to go to the ocean, that’s fine. But if we strike at ourselves for not being at the ocean right now, we’re being impatient.

Peter McWilliams, You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought, p. 429

When I set these words down I was trying to engender (mostly in myself) a philosophical attitude to institutional processes at AU that sometimes seem to drag on longer than I wish they would. But the thought is applicable to other processes as well – creating a good and also sustainable relationship, raising a child, educating a Ph.D. student from admission to completion of the dissertation, getting tenure and, of course finishing my book!