DOES THE PATIENT DOG STILL EAT THE FATTEST BONE?

Words have formed us, instructed, disciplined and educated us. We use words to express our feelings and communicate, in a way through music or art, and when some truths are hard to express, proverbs and poetry do justice to them.

Proverbs cuts across cultures and every language has a proverb, but only a few are more famous than “the patient dog eats the fattest bone”. This is a proverb that identifies the virtue of patience, claiming that it guarantees better returns. Whilst some believe this, others do not because they say that while the patient dog waits, the hustling dog can attack him and take all the bones. In this article, we will address the importance of patience.
If you apply for a job, send in your CV, go for the interview and do not get a response immediately. What do you do? You wait it out. Also, imagine you get pregnant today, and do not get your baby today. What do you do? You wait for nine months. Or even if you place a kettle of cold water on a heated stove, you still wait while it boils. The first point here is that sometimes waiting is not a choice but a necessity. In most both major and minor things we do every day, we tend to wait for them. So waiting may be tiring, but it is not in its entirety bad.

Again, majorly in Nigeria, after graduation from a secondary school, a young person is not guaranteed entrance into the next stage, which is a higher institution. There is usually a delay, either caused by penury or some other thing. So some people wait for one year or two years, others three years and above, worst still a graduate who leaves school and has no job after several years, sadly most people do nothing within this period. In this context, waiting clearly does not yield great results. But waiting is not the virtue, neither is it in the proverb. Patience is.......

TO BE CONTINUED....