Is It a Positive Virture, Though?

My horoscope today reads:

"Develop the patience of a saint. The pressing need to rush to meet a deadline could be working at cross purposes with accuracy. Start nothing new of great importance right now."

Patience, eh? Patience is a curious concept, especially in American culture. We have all sorts of platitudes that advocate it, like the one alluded to in the horoscope and the title of today's post, and we generally accept patience as a desireable quality. And yet, everything in our society pushes us to strive for more, to actively seek greater things, to be decisive and sure, to be anything but patient. Being patient can be seen as being weak, inert, insignificant. Patience is one of those words, like "complacent" or "condescending," that technically denotes something positive while connoting something slightly negative to most people. The patient person appears to us simultaneously wise and enervated.

Now, I don't put any stock in astrology. I read horoscopes out of curiousity and entertainment more than anything else, and if one does accurately reflect a certain present or future reality for me, I see this as an interesting coincidence or the result of creative perspective rather than fact.

However, it is. . . well . . . interesting in light of today's horoscope that I just discovered that our scottie breeder's "bitch" has not come into season yet. She is more than a month overdue. After some research, I discovered that this is not really abnormal since a female dog's reproductive cycle is hardly regular. There are four distinct phases, each of which can vary in length by several days. As a result, the entire cycle tends to last about six months, but this is no where near an exact figure for each and every cycle even in the same bitch. In addition, there is no real way to know when she began a particular phase of the cycle, so the breeder's calculations could easily be off by as much as a month. But the consequence of this delay is that Darling Wife and I have had to decide to either find another breeder who will have puppies available at the late-January/early-February date that we wanted, or stick with our current breeder, meaning we won't be able to bring a puppy home until April at the earliest.

On the one hand, we've already been very patient on this issue, and I do have another breeder waiting to help us get a puppy around the time we want, which we believe to be an advantageous one for us. But on the other hand, there are several incentives for getting the pup in April, and we have already made a significant investment of time, research, and emotion into this breeder and her dogs.

So, we have chosen the route of patience. But I can't help but wonder if our decision indicates a positive, saintly virture, or simply inertia and irresolution.