TITLE: Waiting
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 25, 2005 1:37 PM
DESC: A speech by Vaclav Havel caused me to think about the role of waiting in government, teaching, and software development. Not bad for a Saturday morning.
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BODY:
Last weekend, while my daughter was doing a final
practice for her Suzuki Book I recital, I picked
Vaclav Havel's The Art of the Impossible:
Politics as Morality in Practice off the piano
teacher's bookshelf for a little reading. This
is a collection of speeches and short essays that
Havel in the first half of the 1990s about his role
as dissident, reformer, and president of the Czech
Republic. He is, of course, famous as a poet, and
his writing and speaking style have a poet's flare.
I ended up spending most of my time with Havel's
speech to the Academy of Humanities and Political
Sciences in Paris on October 27, 1992. (I just
noticed the date -- that's my birthday!) This
speech discussed the different forms of waiting.
The first kind is sometimes characterized as
waiting for Godot, after the absurdist
play by Samuel Beckett. In this form, people
wait for some sort of universal salvation. They
have no real hope that life will get better, so
they hold tightly to an irrational illusion of
hope. Havel says that, for much of the 20th
century, residents of the former communist world
waited for Godot.
At the opposite end of the waiting spectrum lies
patience. Havel describes patience as
waiting out of principle -- doing the right thing
because it is right, not out of any expectation of
immediate satisfaction. In this sense, patience
is "waiting as a state of hope, not as an expression
of hopelessness". Havel believes that the dissidents
who ultimately toppled the communist regimes behind
the Iron Curtain practiced this sort of waiting.
When the curtain fell and the people of, say,
Czechoslovakia took their first unsteady steps into
the light of the western world, folks practicing the
different forms of waiting encountered distinctive
problems. Those who had been waiting for Godot
felt adrift in a complex world unlike anything they
had known or expected. They had to learn how to
hope and to be free again.
You might think that the patient dissidents would
have adjusted better, but they faced an unexpected
problem. They had hoped for and imagined
a free world around them, but when they became free
things didn't change fast enough. Havel relates
his own struggles at being too idealistic and now
impatient with the rate at which the Czech and
Slovak republics assumed the mantel of democratic
responsibility. Like many revolutionaries, he was
criticized as out of his element in the new world,
that he was most effective in the role of dissident
but ineffective in the role of democratic leader.
What struck me most about this essay came next.
Havel recognized the problem: He had waited
patiently as a dissident because he had no control
over how anyone but himself behaved. Now that the
huge impediment of an authoritarian regime had
been surmounted, he found that he had become impatient
for all the details of a democratic system to fall
into place. He no longer waited well.
In short, I thought time belonged to me. ...
The world, Being, and history have their own time.
We can, of course, enter that time in a creative
way, but none of us has it entirely in his hands.
The world and Being do heed the commands of the
technologist or the technocrat....
In his own transition from dissident to democratic
leader, Havel learned again that he had to wait
patiently as the world takes its "own meandering
course". He asserts that the "postmodern politician"
must learn waiting as patience -- a waiting founded
on a deep respect for the world and its sense of
time. Read:
His actions cannot derive from impersonal analysis;
they must come out of a personal point of view,
which cannot be based on a sense of superiority
but must spring from humility.
When the world changed, even in the way for which
he had been working, Havel had to learn again how
to be patient.
I think that the art of waiting is something that
has to be learned. We must patiently
plant the seeds and water the ground well, and
give the plants exactly the amount of time they
need to mature.
Just as we cannot fool a plant, we cannot fool history.
I think that 'waiting patiently as the world takes
its own meandering course' translates into showing
respect for people and the rate at which they can
assimilate new ideas and change their behavior.
Perhaps this speech affected me as it did because
I am now thinking about leading my department. I
certainly do not face a situation quite as extreme
as Havel did when the communist regime fell in
Czechoslovakia, yet I am in a situation where people
do not trust the future as much as I'd like, and
I need to find a way to help my department move in
that direction. As Havel reminds me, I cannot move
the department myself; I can only patiently plant
the seeds of trust, water the ground well, and
give the plants the time they need to grow.
The value of this sort of waiting is not limited
to the world of administration. Good instructors
need to wait patiently, working with students to
create the atmosphere in which they can grow and
then giving them time and opportunity to do so.
I also think that this sort of waiting holds great
value in the world of software development. Agile
methods are often characterized by folks in the
traditional software engineering world as impatient
in their desire to get to code sooner. But I think
the opposite is true -- the agile methods are all
about patience: waiting to write a piece
of code until you really know what it should do,
and waiting to design the whole program until you
understand the world well enough to do it right.
In this sense, traditional software engineering is
the impatient approach, telling us to presumptuously
design grand solutions to force the world to follow
our senses of direction and time. The worlds in
which most programs live are too complex for such
hubris.
I cannot resist closing with one last quote from the
rich language of Havel himself:
If we are certain that the planting was good and that
we are watering regularly, we have no reason to be
impatient. It is enough to realize that our waiting
has meaning.
Waiting that has meaning because it grows out of hope
and not hopelessness, from faith and not despair, from
humility toward the time of the world and not out of
fear of its sublime tranquility, is accompanied not by
boredom but by suspense. This kind of waiting is more
than just waiting.
It is life. Life as the joyous involvement in the
miracle of Being.
That sounds like a poet speaking, but it could be a
programmer. And maybe the world would be a better
place if all administrators thought this way. :-)
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