Please Hurry Up and Slow Down

An impatient person comes to terms with inefficiency

Photo by Jahanzeb Ahsan on Unsplash

I’m standing by the front door, coat on, purse slung over my shoulder, keys in hand. I’m ready to go. Halfway to the garage. My husband is…brushing his teeth? Tying his shoes? God knows. But obviously, he’s dawdling. Again.

There are only two kinds of people in the world: Those who seem perfectly happy taking their sweet time, as if time itself were merely a suggestion, and those who can’t wait to just get going already.

I adore punctuality, efficiency, time well spent—meaning, let’s get some shit done. There is a special place in hell reserved for people who can’t end meetings on time because they’re incapable of getting through an agenda.

In case you can’t tell, I’m a wee bit impatient—not with children or the elderly, thank you, but with functioning adults who seem to assume that time is an unlimited commodity, so why not waste as much of it as they can?

Nope. Tempus fugit, as the saying goes.

I’m impatient to get on with life, to make things happen, to get started on the next amazing chapter, journey, revelation that’s out there waiting for me. So hurry on up! Let me get to it!

I’m not ashamed of this personality trait, but it has gotten me into trouble. One time, I’d been selected to interview for an editing job with a big financial company in Manhattan that would surely have tripled or quadrupled my salary at the time, if I landed it. I wanted that job so badly. But the job-search company that led me to it was dragging its feet on getting me an actual interview.

Guess what Impatient Me did? I called the would-be employer directly to plead my case. This was a giant no-no and the woman on the other end of the call was furious with me for overstepping. (I would argue that I was showing strong initiative, but never mind.) Needless to say, I killed that job possibility on the spot, simply because I refused to wait for the gears to turn on their own.

Another time, a few friends and I hatched an idea for an online T-shirt business that would feature our topical, clever slogans. This seemed like a sure-fire winner and we ran, not walked, to form an LLC, trademark our logo, open a bank account, and set up a business that, well, didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of panning out because we hadn’t done nearly enough homework to figure out how online retail actually works—and educate ourselves about all the expensive roadblocks we’d encounter.

I feel responsible for that one because I was the elder stateswoman of our trio and I definitely leapt before looking. But not before we’d all kicked in a fair chunk of change and spent hours barreling ahead. No harm in getting excited about an idea, but launching a business from scratch as a neophyte may not play to an impatient person’s strengths. Ya think?

These days, however, I’m changing my tune. My patience is legendary. Here’s why: I became a full-time writer and learned the hard way that writing and publishing are perhaps the last really slow industries left in our post-modern world. There is so much hurry-up-and-wait in the publishing world that an author can literally grow old waiting for her name to show up on a book’s front cover.

I’m not kidding. It’s not unusual to spend two or three years writing a book, another year or two pitching it, and then—hurray!—somebody wants to publish it. But the clock will tick on, as editing and revising your manuscript can last another six months, until finally…wait for it…I mean, literally, wait for it…the book is scheduled for publication nearly two years after all that!

So many new gray hairs will have sprouted in the meantime! I have lived this slo-mo life, big-time. My new novel, Tent City, has taken seven years to travel from manuscript to publication. I’m practically a different person now than when I started writing the thing—older, yes, but also wiser. My chronic impatience has come smack up against the unbelievably slow-moving decision trees that make up the publishing world’s gatekeepers, from agents to editors, from writing contests to conference organizers.

And believe or not, I’m grateful now for the long slog because practicing patience has forced me to grind—by which I mean, to be persistent, to stay true to my vision for this book, to believe in it for years. I weathered countless rejections, yet I never was willing to let go.

Impatient Me would have quit trying and moved on.

I nearly did just that—until I learned to value the marathon over the sprint.

Time’s accretion has made room for me to become an astute reader of my own material and to value a protracted revision process that made my book better when I let the work marinate.

Learning patience has also made me a better listener, someone able to be present in the moment, even if the moment feels like an hour. That also makes me a better writer, especially when it comes to capturing the emotional beats of a scene.

The unexpected bonus that results from my novel taking the long way ’round to reality is that it’s more relevant now than when I wrote it; Tent City’s themes exploring the decline of the American Dream resonate in 2026 in ways they didn’t back in 2019.

Hurray for the slow crawl and the long slog!

These days, I’m still forced to hurry up and wait for my husband to get ready to go. I recognize that he’ll never change, and I’ve come to accept that. (Once a dawdler, always a dawdler.) Besides, I’m much better at waiting than I used to be. I’m grateful for the extra moment to think and reflect, for time will pass anyway, and it’s for the best that I can’t actually rush it along.

Amy L. Bernstein’s new novel, Tent City, is at long last available wherever books are sold. And now she’s impatient to share it. Learn more at www.amywrites.live