Patience

The Tao of Pooh

Benjamin Hoff · 1982

Hoff uses Winnie-the-Pooh to explain the Taoist idea of not forcing things, of working with the grain of a situation rather than against it. It sounds slight and turns out to be profound. Pooh gets where he is going by not fretting about getting there, and Hoff makes a gentle, persuasive case that much of our impatience is simply effort spent in the wrong direction.

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh, what’s the first thing you say? What’s for breakfast? Think about now.”

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway · 1952

An old fisherman hooks a great fish and then must simply hold on, for days, as it pulls his small boat out to sea. That is the whole book, and it is one of the most quietly gripping studies of endurance ever written. Santiago cannot rush the fish or force the outcome. He can only stay steady and refuse to let go. For anyone in the middle of a long test of patience, he is the right companion.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard · 1974

Dillard spent a year watching a small patch of creek and wood in Virginia, and wrote it all down: the muskrats, the light, the slow beauty of the natural world. It is a book about the reward of patient attention, of staying still long enough to actually see. Reading it retrains something in you. You come away slower, and more willing to wait for the world to show you what it is doing.

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles · 2016

Sentenced to house arrest in a grand Moscow hotel, Count Rostov must build a whole life within its walls while decades pass outside. It is a novel about making a rich existence out of a narrow one, about patience as a form of grace rather than defeat. Warm, elegant and quietly hopeful, it is perfect for anyone whose own life feels, for now, on hold.

The Overstory

Richard Powers · 2018

A novel built around trees, and around the enormous, patient timescale on which they live. Powers asks us to imagine growth measured in centuries rather than days, and the effect is oddly steadying. Set beside the slow, deep time of a forest, our own impatience starts to look very small. A big, ambitious book for anyone who needs reminding that the important things take their time.

The Salt Path

Raynor Winn · 2018

A bestselling story of a couple who, having lost their home, set out to walk the South West Coast Path with almost nothing, one slow day at a time. Read it as an inspiring tale of endurance rather than a factual record, since questions have been raised about how closely it follows real events. Taken that way, as a portrait of putting one foot in front of the other when you cannot see how things will resolve, it still moves and steadies, and carries the particular patience that a long walk teaches.