I’ve spent the past four years writing and rewriting my debut novel. It has been an exercise in patience—an endurance contest. More challenging than the actual writing was the waiting: submitting to literary agents, waiting for responses, lingering in a state of limbo day after day, hoping my email inbox would contain the golden invitation to submit a full manuscript. Then came more waiting—hoping that the agents who requested the full manuscript would say they were ready to submit it to a publisher. It is a familiar purgatory for querying writers.
A year ago, I stopped waiting. I grabbed hold of the ladder that led toward self-publishing, with its many rungs. Now that my book is published, I can see I made the right choice. In learning how to self-publish, I met and worked with a talented team of creators, editors, and established authors. They became friends—the kind of people who have your back when life gets tough.
That experience made me curious about patience itself. I recently listened to a podcast on the topic, part of the Hidden Brain series hosted by Shankar Vedantam. His guest was psychologist Sarah Schnitzer.
Schnitzer explains why uncertainty is so difficult for humans:
“Well, if you think about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, uncertainty often meant a threat. When things are certain—even if something bad is happening—you at least know what to expect and what to do. But when things are uncertain, it’s such an aversive state. We not only have to prepare for threat, but we don’t know what the solution is. It takes a lot of effort to persist in that uncertainty, and it just doesn’t feel good.”
She adds that patience itself can be taken too far:
“There is a vice of what might be called too much patience. You can be reckless and move forward with violence or haste toward your goal, which we often think of as impatience. But you can also fall prey to passivity or inaction—waiting too long. To practice patience well, we have to find that sweet spot, that golden mean between recklessness and passivity.”
(Hidden Brain: “You 2.0 — The Practice of Patience”)
Another perspective comes from meditation teacher Jack Kornfield. “Patience has a certain impatience built into it. In Zen the word is ‘constancy.’ Instead of patience, constancy is a dedication to what you love and what you care about. With that dedication comes a trust that by planting beautiful seeds, eventually, in their own time, they will bear fruit.”
So perhaps patience is about degree—finding the Goldilocks spot. And perhaps the opposite of patience is not impatience, but apathy. Patience as constancy. A calibrated dedication, trusting that seeds, once planted, will grow and produce beautiful results.
Here’s wishing each of us a generous measure of patience as we navigate the uncertainties of 2026.
~ Julie Snider
