“The strongest of all warriors are these two — time and patience.”
— Tolstoy, War and Peace
There’s something about that quote that sticks in your throat, like truth often does. It’s deceptively simple.
Raising a child. Starting a business. Completing a degree. Closing the deal. Building a relationship that doesn’t crack under pressure. All of it — the things we’ll be proudest of at the end — they ask for more than effort. They ask for time. They ask for patience. Not the passive kind, not waiting in a queue, but the active sort — the kind that means coming back again and again, long after the novelty has worn off.
We’re born with a finite number of chips — days, hours, moments — but we don’t know the count. And ironically, we burn through some of the most meaningful ones early on. Childhood. First love. First heartbreak. Early ambition. A year feels like forever when you’re young, and then suddenly decades start to fold in on themselves like weeks. You blink and everything’s different.
Maybe that’s the quiet power of time. It reshapes us whether we like it or not. But patience? That’s the choice. The act of staying — with a difficult conversation, with a crying baby, with a business model that hasn’t found its market yet. If we can align our limited time with our most patient selves, maybe that’s what creates meaning. Not chasing every new thing, not abandoning what’s hard — but returning. Gently. Repeatedly. With love.
Because if we spend our time frivolously — especially with the hearts of others — we end up poor, even if everything else looks rich.
3D5G 