The title of this week's Wehem comes from an obscure comedy sketch that was popular in the late 1970s, in which a rowdy American signs up for courses in the martial arts with a master. When it is explained to that he will not be able to "beat up bozos" just because he has "bought the pajamas" and is ready to begin, the hapless subject of the sketch turns on his master and receives a "boot to the head"; both the name of the comedy sketch and the name of a martial arts move taught by this master of the art of Tae Kwon Leap.

Getting a "boot to the head" is not uncommon in the life of a truly religious person. In the zeal to succeed and the desire to gain spiritual wisdom, many a person can get ahead of himself, or think he is ready simply because he says he is, or because he has gone through the motions he sees others taking before him. Eventually, he realizes this and stops to regroup. Sometimes, especially in religious groups, people at the same level of spiritual growth will inexplicably begin to "compete" with each other, even subconsciously, as everyone is seemingly in a race to God and nobody wants to get there last....

Is this, as the comedy sketch had suggested, a byproduct of the "me first" culture cultivated in the modern world? Perhaps. It may also signify some other misunderstandings about what a spiritual life is, and what role patience, and the nature of time itself, play in human lives.

It is within human nature, I suspect, to be in a hurry. Life on earth is painfully finite; the natural span of a human life is a mere trifle in the grand scheme of things. As a child, one is always "(age) and a half"... looking forward to that next birthday, that next achievement. No one wants to be eight years old, unless of course they are 48 and unhappy with their current state of life. Human life seems for many people to be an unending marathon, where occasionally they stop and lose momentum; or before or after that are taken off the track without a trace. In the Western world with microwave dinners and fax machines and cable modems, life is even faster than a footrace; it is faster than the speed of light, work all the time, forget sleeping or raising a family or even stopping to breathe. One wonders where it will stop.

In 1996 I was blessed to visit Egypt, the modern name of the very ancient country from whence my faith originally comes. I visited as a true pilgrim, in order to accept a very important responsibility (that of my coronation as Nisut to my people); and also because I was at a point in my own life where I was questioning the "need for speed," stopping to find out who had booted ME in the head, as it were. Netjer taught me more than a few lessons during those two weeks, and many of them were about time.

One of the first things I learned in Egypt was the so-called national acronym:

IBM

And no, that's not Big Blue. IBM stands for the three most commonly-used phrases in Egyptian Arabic (according to my host): Insh'Allah ("God willing"), Bukra ("tomorrow"), and Mumkin ("maybe"). This is telling. These are people with a very different sense of time than the West. I came to find the difference so refreshing that upon my return to New York, I actually broke down and wept in the airport, overwhelmed by a preponderance of clocks and shoving people and missed connections. In the Western world, our sense of time ferments a sense of helplessness, of feeling we are dragged along by circumstances and that we must always push further, higher, faster. In Egypt, time is a gift: never squandered, always relished. Nothing moves quickly in Egypt; it all moves just fast enough, and if it doesn't get done, there's always tomorrow. We can all learn something from Egypt.

There is an old English saying, "Patience is a virtue." In a world where virtue is a convenience rather than a requirement, this can often be forgotten. Patience is a rare skill indeed; the ability to be able to say to Time's face, "I can wait," takes courage and faith. Learning patience in spiritual life can be even more difficult, especially if one is unhappy with where one is or was previously. We are not taught to be patient; we are taught to seek results and not be satisfied until we see them concretely. Even the ancients recognized this: one of the 42 virtues recited in the Negative Confession in the judgment translates: "I did not seek to be that which is not yet."

Patience is more than a virtue. It is a part of Ma'at: observing where one is at any given point in time, where one is headed, and learning how quickly or slowly one is to progress: all show the balance which is Ma'at. If a person is in Ma'at, she has no need to be in a hurry. Ma'at is never late and rarely early. And like the Egyptians of today and yesterday, She will wait up and leave the light on for you.

A boot to the head? God willing, maybe, tomorrow.