Patience

Seek a pastime that demands the development of patience: an activity with no final whistle; no finish line; no scoreboard.  Find something that you love and can lose yourself in for hours and hours without realising.  These days it seems that many of us can't handle being alone with ourselves for more than about twenty seconds - just take a look around next time you're stood on a railway platform or in the queue at the supermarket and watch all of the humanity around you reaching for their phones because they're so uncomfortable just being in the present.  There's real value in having to wait for a reward, be it waiting for the tide to turn, for the fish to start to rise or for the rock to dry out after a rain shower.  It gives you the sort of time needed to let things settle and to subconsciously process your thoughts.  Patience is becoming a lost art, and whilst there are many benefits to the immediacy of modern culture, the loss of our ability to wait for things to happen in their own god time is surely something that we ought to make efforts to salvage.  It's said that patient men win the day, after all.