It's fair to say that patience has a terrible name. For one thing, the prospect of doing anything that you've been told will require patience simply seems unattractive. More specifically, though, it's disturbingly passive. It is the virtue that has traditionally been urged upon housewives, while their husbands led more exciting lives outside the home; or on racial minorities, told to wait just a few more decades for their full civil rights. The talented but self-effacing employee who "waits patiently" for a promotion, we tend to feel, will be waiting a long time: she ought to be trumpeting her achievements instead. In all such cases, patience is a way of psychologically accommodating yourself to a lack of power, an attitude intended to help you to resign yourself to your lowly position, in theoretical hopes of better days to come. But as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry ─ to allow things to take the time they take ─ is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of putting off all your fulfillment to the future.