The Art of Deliberate Patience

It was the first snow day of the year on Monday, (November 3rd, by the way, the earliest in my recollection but who's counting) and we did all the typical snow-man-day things, but one of the unexpected benefits was that we lost power and the Internet for the day. Usually that's an imposition of course, but we had a generator and nowhere to be so we came up with our own entertainment.

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I remember one of my favorite past-times as a child was building card houses. We had drawers full of partial decks that were never thrown out and I would transform them into impossible towers and forts. I hadn't thought about them until (after a cut throat family tournament of UNO) my son and I started new construction!  


I would build, build, build and watch half a tower fall down just to build, build, build again. What I realized is that learning how the tower falls became an integral aspect of the final product itself. And most importantly, I learned a kind of patience in this iteration process. Deliberate patience is something our kids don't experience much these days.  (A friend of mine said, "Try watching your T-Ball player wait for a hit in deep right and you'll appreciate patience." ) Developing a practiced patience that comes from stacking cards I was encouraged how long my boys were willing to stick with it.

(My personal record as a child was nine tiers high and something I'm still proud of.)