Trademe has become something of an iconic New Zealand website. I don’t know anyone who has never heard of it and most take a look from time to time. One of my kids has bought a few things over the last couple of year and so have I. However, I’ve never sold anything - until now.
About a week back I put all the information in the right boxes, added a few photos and then clicked submit. Voila! I had my own online auction. Then that waiting began. A couple of days went by with no bids and no enquiries. I developed a kind of introspective panic that perhaps it wasn’t worth what I thought. I toyed with the idea of reducing the starting bid, but I stayed my keyboard hand and kept the reserve as it was.
Then came the questions. Dumb questions; questions asked by tyre-kickers who had no intention of buying. Then there was nothing. The last day of the auction arrived and I went to work wondering if there was another way to sell.
You can imagine my surprise when I returned home late at night to discover an email from trademe confirming that my item had indeed been sold well above reserve. I went online to look at the auction and was staggered to see a list of some twenty people who had bid and outbid each other in the last 5 minutes. Not one of them had asked a question!
Patience is a difficult thing. I have always thought of myself as being a patient person, but this little episode reminded me how quickly I can be tempted to make unnecessary changes. The old saying, “Timing is everything” holds true. Impatience allured me to think I was asking too much; time revealed it was a bit too cheap. When we sold our house some years ago the real estate agent reminded us that it only took one person to close a deal. They were right. It’s the waiting that’s the problem.
The catalyst to impatience is waiting and the result is obsession: an unhealthy focus on a very narrow area of life at the expense of all others. Obsession is based a faulty belief that this “one thing” will change our lives, it will be the source of real happiness and joy. The feelings of expectation can be so intense we might even feel that world peace will break out when our expectation is finally achieved. It won’t. However, that intensity of feeling can push us to make very rash and often unhelpful decisions.
The art of waiting patiently is learned. It’s the ability to refocus on other important parts of our lives that need equal attention - not just the exciting bits. It also tells us what kind of people we are becoming.
The Bible claims that the sign of God’s presence in a persons life is revealed in the following words: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. They are good words. The question is, would we trade our obsessions for them?
Digby Wilkinson 2009