[Greetings from Austin! I am happy to report that my second book, “This Way to the Stars: A History of the Hero,” sits safely in the hands of my Fiverr friend in charge of formatting the book for paperback and Kindle. This puts me about 14 days away from being able to publish. With the work between me and publishing virtually finished (except the audiobook recording, content creation, and marketing), you would think I have cause for celebration.
But instead, I find myself face to face with an overwhelming feeling that my efforts were futile—that I poured a mountain of energy into this thing for nothing. “Few will read it, and far fewer still will like it,” says the Imposter. “You sold less than 300 copies of your first book, and this one will do even worse. You are naught but a delusional rambler masquerading as a writer—a madman shouting into a void and thinking the echo is clever, stroking your ego to try and soothe yourself into forgetting you are floating in an abyss. Prepare to be irrelevant. Unhelpful. Useless.”
So says the Imposter who adversely possesses a parcel in my mind. Try as I might, I cannot evict him. Perhaps that’s because he’s not entirely wrong. In fact, I’m quite certain that the reason he sticks around is because everything he says holds a grain of truth. Yet one grain does not color the whole heap. Nor does one snapshot tell the entire story.
A strange part of this limbo between completing the book and publishing, for me, is needing to disarm the Imposter and coach myself back to the belief that it’s not my job to worry about how it is received by others. I have done my duty and delivered the book to the best of my current capabilities, and that is enough, regardless of what comes next: five copies or 50,000. All I can do now is lift my book in sacrifice and surrender to the wall of water that’s about to come crashing down.
All I can do now is choose to trust the Voice that opposes the Imposter, whispering in my depths: “Patience and obedience, dear boy, patience and obedience will deliver it all.”
This brings us to the topic of today’s essay—the call and promise of patience: “By your patient endurance, you will gain your souls.”1]
Two laws stand fast: things created may not last, and patience provides. The universe is change; virtue is endurance and long obedience. It is the second of these two laws that we see given poetic expression in many of the great stories across time.
Consider, for example, the Aeneid, which tells the story of pious Aeneas as he leads the exiled Trojans on a long journey to fulfill their destiny of establishing Rome. After seven years of sailing, half-settling, and struggling, the Trojans stop in Sicily to hold a funeral for Anchises (Aeneas’s father).
While the men hold funeral games, the women weep by shore, and questions about whether they can (or want to) continue on to Italy start to stir. Seeing her opportunity to interrupt destiny, Juno (Roman Hera) sends Iris (her messenger) down in disguise to water the seeds of impatience:
Seven summers gone since Troy went down
and still we’re swept along, measuring out each land, each sea—
how many hostile rocks and stars?—scanning an endless ocean,
chasing an Italy fading still as the waves roll us on.2
Hearing the words of Iris, the women—exhausted and dreading their return to a journey that has already lasted seven summers and has no end in sight—pick up torches and branches and send the ships up in flames.
Seeing the black clouds of smoke rise, Aeneas and the rest of the men rush to shore. Finding their transports up in flames, devoted Aeneas throws his hands up in prayer and is at a loss. With destiny hanging in the balance, Aeneas wrestles with whether to abandon the dreams of Rome and settle, instead, in Sicily.
But captain Aeneas, dazed by this swift sharp blow,
kept wrestling the overriding anguish in his heart,
now this way, that way. Should he forget his fate
and settle in Sicily now, or head for Italian shores?3
Seeing pious Aeneas struggle, his counselor Nautes, speaks up and consoles Aeneas with one of the Aeneid’s most iconic lines: “Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.”4 Revived by Nautes’s words, Aeneas gathers his people, salvages the ships he can, and presses on toward the goal—eventually his patience delivering his people to the promised land and paving the way for Rome to rise.
We see a similar lesson in Tolstoy’s classic War and Peace. At one point in a conversation between Prince Andrew and Kutúzov—the humble commander who led the Russian forces against the French and their self-absorbed leader Napoleon—Kutúzov recalls to Prince Andrew the role that patience played in the Turkish war:
‘Kamenski would have been lost if he had not died. He stormed fortresses with thirty thousand men. It is not difficult to capture a fortress but it is difficult to win a campaign. For that, not storming and attacking but patience and time are wanted… Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait… [B]elieve me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.’5
I firmly believe that what’s true for Virgil and Tolstoy is true for us. Patience and time will do it all. It is, as Nietzsche put it, “long obedience in the same direction” that leads to the things that make life worth living.
It is not the cheers of the crowds or the wealth of the world. It is not the job well received that is a success; it is the job well done. And perhaps Luke’s verse that “[b]y your patient endurance, you will gain your souls” is more than mere truth—perhaps it’s a prophecy.
P.S. The type of patience I’m talking about is waiting, but it is not passive. To wait without labor is laziness and lethargy. True patience is to work relentlessly even when the results are uncertain. It is to water the seed daily when all its growth is beneath the surface. It is to keep going when the going is rough, and progress is tough. That is true patience.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.6
Luke 21:19.
Aeneid, Book V, p. 173 of the Fagles translation.
Aeneid, Book V, p. 176 of the Fagles translation.
Aeneid, Book V. On p. 176 of the Fagles translation, he interprets the lines this way: “Whatever Fortune sends, we master it all / by bearing it all, we must!”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Chapter XVI.
Henry Wadsworth, A Psalm of Life.
When the triangle is complete the harmony will be heard and bring guidance, peace, and abundance to the masses. It will be beautiful. Until then, we patiently work with no reward.
The Gemini