Patience is a schedule

My father's sage-green ledger has a column he never labeled. It's dates. Next to every entry that was waiting on something — a paper order, a check in the mail, a customer who'd promised — there's a date, and next to the date, in smaller writing, the day he'd follow up. He called it patience. It was a schedule.

I think about that column every time someone tells me they're "being patient" with a credit dispute. What they usually mean is that they mailed a letter and are waiting to feel something. That isn't patience. That's hoping.

The difference

Patience as a virtue is a feeling you're supposed to have while nothing happens. Patience as a schedule is a set of dates you've written down: the day the green card came back, the thirtieth day after it, the fifth business day after that when the results letter is due, the day you'll re-pull. Calvin laid out the whole sequence this month. It isn't inspiring. It's better than inspiring; it's finite.

The feeling version fails because it has no end. The schedule version can't fail that way. Either the bureau's letter arrives by the date or it doesn't, and either outcome tells you what to do next.

The question under the question

The question people ask is how long do I have to wait. The question under it is what am I waiting for, and the honest answer, if you haven't written the dates down, is for permission to stop. The dates give you that. Day thirty-five, no letter: you stop waiting and write again.

The column

Draw it. A sheet of paper, four columns: item, mailed, received, due. My father's ran to forty years. Yours needs to run to sixty days, and then the house.