Prudence, Patience, Providence

I was re-re-re-reading one of my favorite science fiction series re-re-recently, and there were three sisters with these names, so I decided to write a thing about it. Ha.

Prudence is something you exercise, or an attribute of a person. It refers to the status of having clear judgment and a strong impulse of caution. Your friends might tell you a clearly safe investment is the "prudent" thing to do. Your prudence tells you not to reach into the dark crevice in the cliffside, because there might be a bloody great scorpion in there.

Being prudent, however, is different from being a prude. As you might assume, the two words are obviously deeply related. A prude, however, is basically someone of such mighty prudence that it prevents them from doing anything constructive. These are the people who look down their nose at other people's actions and shut themselves away from contact to avoid the risk. These are also people traditionally presented with very austere, wrinkled faces and the dress of Pilgrims. Eh.

Patience, as it's said, is a virtue. This is the ability to sit and be content with doing nothing for a little while, and also the potential to handle the inevitable foolery of other people to a certain degree. Everyone has a different amount of patience, but it's important to note that some of patience is not purely altruistic; tolerance of misbehavior is often undergone with the assumption that the patient person will receive the same leeway in future. 

Patience is very different from impassivity. My sitting contentedly in the repair shop for eight hours after a campout in my youth was me being patient. The amount of time I spend playing video games and finding other ways to distract myself are manifestations of impassivity. Being patient doesn't mean you never do anything, or that your patience doesn't have a limit. Patience is about discretion about the tolerated annoyance vs. its payoff, and also knowing when to stop being patient.

Providence! People take it to mean "good luck," and that's not the worst way to categorize it. In an older definition, however, it's more like "the hand of divinity nudging events your way." Sometimes life just presents you with something for the taking, in a "here's this, just take it" sort of way. Some traditions call this karma, the eventual reward for steadfast goodness. In our lifetime, there are hosts of things that seem too good to be true, and many of them are. However, occasionally the universe does just tick over to everybody's number and "throw them a frickin' bone."

Now, with that in mind, acknowledgment of providence is great, but gullibility isn't. Life presenting you with something too good to be true? There's a significant chance it is, so investigate. This is the synthesis of all these different ideas: be patient enough to wait for opportunity, prudent enough to distinguish the genuine opportunities, and open enough to acknowledge when they actually do come along.

TL;DR Prudence, not paranoia; patience, not impassivity; providence happens, but not everything is providence.