Episode Four: The Patience of Fred Rogers

Welcome to the Neighborhood, a Mr. Rogers tribute podcast. I'm your host, Rick Lee James, of rickleejames.com, and I run the Mr. Rogers quote Twitter account found @MrRogersSay. As we again walk into this podcast neighborhood, we want you to know that no matter where you are from, you are welcome here. I'm glad to be your neighbor. Every daughter, every son, every tribe and every tongue, in the spirit of Fred Rogers and the life of welcome that he lived, Welcome to the Neighborhood. This week in the neighborhood, our subject is patience.

He is our very own version of Mr. McFeely, always delivering good conversation for us on the program. He's an expert at helping people tell their stories. He produces engaging, innovative media for public radio, public television, and public events. He's the executive producer and host of Things Not Seen: Conversations Conversations About Culture and Faith, which airs weekly in Chicago on WYLL 1160 AM and is distributed by PRX. He's also the executive producer of The Francis Effect podcast. David Dault, welcome to the neighborhood.

Rick, it's always good to be back with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I am so glad to be able to have a conversation with you again today. You know, we haven't really caught up since last time, but we were just commenting on how we are almost halfway to the number of episodes that we were planning to do on this first season. We had planned for 9, and I can't believe we're already in episode 4.

I know, it's a wonderful thing, and I remember when you first mentioned this to me as a possibility. It's so nice to see that it has come to pass, and I'm especially pleased to see all the people that are responding to it and have said such very kind things about the work that we've done together. So I just want to say how much I appreciate you and how much I appreciate the listeners who have tuned in who are sharing this with their friends.

Well, certainly, and I appreciate having you here week after week. And I do want to remind all our listeners, just while we have a quick moment here to talk, our website is welcomeneighbor.podbean.com if you want to go and check out our show notes and learn more about us. And there's also a link to all the things that David is doing there and some links to my other podcasts and endeavors on there. But I wanted to make mention really quick, and I know we're talking about patience today, so maybe saying that we're going to do something really quick Rick won't go quite along with that. But I just wanted to say, I don't know if it's related to this show or not and all of the kind people who have been following it, but from the time we released episode 1, we were almost to 30,000 followers on the @MrRogersSay Twitter feed. And here we are starting to record episode 4 just a few weeks later, and we have 37,600 followers. So we've grown by over 7,000 people that have been, you know, many of which are listening to this show and being a part of our conversation. So I am just so glad. And so to all of you listening, whether this is your first time or you've been joining us, or even if you've just been following on Twitter and are starting to be a part of these conversations, uh, to you we also say welcome to the neighborhood. We are so glad to have you with us. Well, David, let's get into, uh, our topic for today, and the topic is patience And I know that patience is one of those things that comes very difficult to many of us, if not most of us. And I know you got— you have some good conversation starters for us today as we begin.

Well, I— one thing that I thought about when I learned that this was the topic for this week, I thought about a teacher that I had in high school. And this teacher had a lot of idiosyncrasies, and one of, one of the things that she did repeatedly was to try and give students encouragement in various memorable forms. And one One that has stuck with me for more than 30 years, from that time in high school to now, is a poem that she had up on the wall. And the poem said, put up in a place where it's easy to see, the cryptic admonishment TTT: when you see how depressingly slowly you climb, it's good to remember that things take time. And I can't tell you the number of times that I have thought about exactly that phrase as I'm struggling with something or I'm just getting started with something and I'm so angry at myself because I haven't mastered it immediately. That phrase comes back into my head: things take time. And it has been a balm and a blessing to me for more than 3 decades. And I'm wondering if you have experience with this, Rick. Do you ever get frustrated when you try and do something new?

Certainly. And you know, in some ways, this very podcast that we're recording right now, it took us nearly a year from the time that we started talking about it to when we actually began recording. Not quite a year, but by the time we're recording, I think yesterday was about a year from the time that we first started having conversations about it. And part of that was just trying to formulate what this would look like and the format we wanted to take and how we wanted to welcome people. And in my mind, when I'm starting something, whether it be a new album, which by the way also takes sometimes over a year from the time of planning to the time of recording, and sometimes even 2 years at times before you release. And it can be very frustrating, but you're exactly right. You can't rush it if you're going to do it right, and things do take time, and it's just part of the process. And it's probably good that things take time. And I mean, we can look out at— if you grow a garden, you know, we've been growing a few vegetables this year, and the process of seeing them take time and grow and going out with my son in different parts of the day and say, hey, are they— you know, the beans are starting to get some bloom on them there, and we're starting to see them grow. But it just doesn't happen overnight, as much as we would like it to. And oftentimes the things that don't take much time are things that really don't hang around for long either, I think.

I think that that's true. And one of the things that I've been reflecting on as I've been thinking about this topic is exactly that. The notion that something that is labor-intensive or something that takes time to acquire as a skill can actually be worth it, and that that's one of the things that we can say both to ourselves but also to our children. Because the frustration, Rick, that I feel and that I know that you feel, and the frustration that we see our children experience, that can be very dissuading. That can make you want to quit. It can make you want to stop and go and do something that is much easier. And the notion that that which is truly worthwhile is always difficult, that's an important lesson to learn, and it's one that I see my children learning a lot faster than I did. I probably didn't learn that until my late 20s or mid-30s, that it's good sometimes to really invest in something that even if it's frustrating to you, it takes time, it takes effort, But to have the patience with yourself, that's been a lesson that's been very long coming for me to learn.

Yes, I totally agree with you on that. We're in the middle of learning to ride a bike as well as learning to tie shoes here with my son. Not me, I already know those things, but with my son. And, and those things do take patience and time, and sometimes he wants to know it right now, and it just doesn't happen right away. You just— some things, and especially things where worth doing, they do take that patience and they do take that time.

Well, Rick, if you've got a moment, I'd like you to think back to when you first learned to play guitar, or when you first learned to put a song together. Did that happen immediately, or did that take effort and patience, and did it, did it have a learning curve attached to it?

My goodness, I wish it would have happened immediately, but no, it didn't at all. In fact, when I first started learning guitar, I was 15 years old. I was probably a late bloomer for some of the, the better guitarists that are out there. But I lived out in the country, a good 15 to 20 minutes away from anything in town. Even my school was that far away. And one thing that I had was time. I would be out at my house, and of course this was before internet and cell phones and things like that, so there's not a lot of other things that were distracting me, thank God. And I would sit for hours in my room, and I just loved it. And as frustrated as I would be become, at how slow it seemed at times to learn things that I wanted to learn and songs and how to play them, there was such a sweet victory whenever I would get that song at last or finally learn some riff that I was trying to do and when my fingers would stop being sore, you know, from initially when you first start. Boy, it takes a lot of pain in the beginning when you're holding down those strings, and yet now when I look back at it, I'm so grateful for the time that it took because I really I really had to learn it well, and now I can play just about anything, and I have so much freedom in what I do that I can play a lot of things without even thinking about it. But at the time, it was just a constant struggle and a constant effort, and I really needed to have that patience. And I had a very patient teacher who told me maybe a year after I started playing, after I had excelled quite a bit as a student and became one of his top students, he said, In those first few lessons, I didn't know about you because he said you didn't have a lot of talent, but you worked really hard and the talent came as you worked harder. And he said, "After a few months, I just knew you were going to be one of my top students because you worked so hard and there were other people that came in that seemingly had more skill in the beginning, but they kind of got bored with it and didn't work at it and just kind of let it go." And so, I think I learned a valuable lesson about patience through music, so I'm glad you brought that up.

This is a lesson that I wish that I had learned when I was much younger, and that is the ability to become good at something oftentimes takes the willingness to be bad at something and to be bad in the beginning and to suffer through where you know that you want to be versus where you know, if you're honest, that you are. And what you just said about the hours that it took, training your muscles and even just training your skin to not be in pain when you play guitar. That to me is such an important lesson, not only in my own life, but I hope also for our listeners, for us to share with our listeners. This notion that, you know, patience with yourself when you know that you want to be doing something and you're not good at it yet, but it's important enough to you and it's valuable enough to you to put in the time to really be bad at it for a little while until it gets good. And this is one of the things that I like so much about Mr. Rogers, is that he was willing to let people be who they are and where they are at that given moment. He wasn't judging them. He wasn't trying to force them along or to shame them for not being better at something, even better at being kind than, than they were able to be at that moment. He trusted in the process of their own development, and he trusted that left to their own devices, they would want to choose the good if they could, if they were given the opportunity and the support to do it. And that kind of faith in that process, that's a powerful lesson for me. And like I say, it's one that I'm still learning. It's one that I don't, I don't always remember with my, with myself. I don't always remember it as a parent. But one of the things that is so valuable to me about the example of Mr. Rogers is exactly that he, that he was able to show that day in and day out. And it probably wasn't easy for him. I imagine that he some days was worse at this than others, but he made the— and we've talked about this before in other episodes— he made the choice to practice and to build habits of patience and kindness and acceptance that over time grew into vast gardens of these virtues in his life. And I think that that's, that's probably one of the strongest lessons, is just even if you're bad at being kind initially, it is so worth the effort to do it, even badly. And you get better as you try it again and again and again.

Yes, totally agree with that. And, and he would even in the program sometimes when things didn't go the way that every, you know, everybody would have thought they wanted to— and listeners will hear a little bit more about this later in the show— but even in some of the episodes, he would leave things in that that weren't perfect and would give things time to happen even while they were filming a show and didn't want to rush through it. And I find it fascinating that as much as, especially in children's television shows, as it seems like now everything is so high octane and just constantly trying to grab their attention, that his approach was to slow down and require patience of those who were viewing, including children who were viewing at the time. And I can still see the way that in my own son, as we'll sit with him at the end of the day and watch an episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, how the show and the way that Mr. Rogers uses patience, just, it will calm him down and it calms us down and it makes us stop and become more reflective. And I'm so grateful for that and the art of that, that he was showing us, because I do think there is a real struggle to it and an art to that kind of patience.

Well, this is the— probably the note that I'd like to end on, and that is, as a parent, one of the lessons that I have to learn again and again is how to be willing to let my children be bad at something. I've been to graduate school, and I come from a very high-pressure childhood. I am a perfectionist. I like to do things right, and I like to do them well.. And sometimes, especially when my children were very young, they would, they would attempt something and I would find myself wanting to just step in and do it for them because I wanted to see it done right. And the lesson that I had to learn, Rick, again and again was it's not about doing it right. It's about the joy of learning to do it themselves. And learning to step back and let my children be themselves and learning to let my children have their own mistakes and the blessing of learning through their mistakes. That is a hard thing to do day in and day out. But, but now, 7 and 8 years on, as my, as my children are growing older, I see the fruits of being willing to let them struggle and being willing to let them grow through their mistakes. They don't have to do it right the first time, and I don't have to have them do it right the first time. But man, Man, it took a long time, and I still struggle with it, but it took a long time to let that lesson really take root in my soul. And it's a blessing, but man, it was difficult at the beginning.

Yeah, I really don't think I have much I could add to that. I agree with you so much. And just even today, I was— I don't know if you've ever tried golf with your children or not, but miniature golf or even going to a driving range, but today I was doing some last minute before school starts stuff with my son. And we went to a driving range and we're swinging golf clubs and hitting balls. And what you want to do, at least what I want to do, is, "No, no, this is how you do it." And so much of it is showing him but then letting him work through it himself. He has to learn it and he's improving, but it's a hard thing to learn at first. And I just totally agree with what you said, giving our children that space and being patient with them and allowing them to do it is so important.

Well, Rick, I mean, what you're saying about that is, I, you know, when we are able to do that and when we're able to do that over time, I think, because we don't immediately see the fruits of it, and I think this circles right back to the whole notion of patience in the beginning. Patience is all about trusting the process, trusting that the fruit will come even if you can't see it breaking the ground right now. That's what Mr. Rogers was so good at doing. But I think that everything in our culture right now is designed to tease us away from that wisdom, to make us feel like immediate results are the only results that matter. That's one of the reasons why I'm so thankful for an example of someone like Mr. Rogers, to be able to show us that, you know, what we're really waiting for is not going to be visible in this moment. What we're waiting for and what we're hoping in is maybe that invisible thing that we know is working, even if it's not evident right now.

Yes, I'll just say amen on that. I agree with you very much so. Well, any other thoughts you had today before we move on with, with the rest of our episode?

Well, just, it has been plain to me from some of the social media interaction that the things that you and I are talking about are speaking to listeners and that the listeners are taking the lessons of Mr. Rogers to heart. And I just want to say how thankful I am that, first, that people are listening, but that what they're listening to and what they're taking from our conversations seems to be valuable to them in their daily lives. And I just, I hope that that will continue. I'm very thankful halfway through this first season to be seeing already some of the fruits of that in not just our lives, but in the lives of our listeners.

Yes, indeed. And David, you know, before you go, I wonder, any advice on being patient with yourself? Oh my.

So I have a lot of internal dialogue. I have voices in my head that are constantly yelling at me that I'm not good enough, that I'm not smart enough, that I'm not doing things right. And even when I stand up in front of a crowd and I do some kind of presentation. This happened to me just the other day. I could get feedback on all of the feedback sheets that all say this was excellent, this was wonderful, but there'll be that one piece of feedback that is negative that says, oh well, this didn't do right, or this fell short in this place, and that will be what I will think about for the next day and the day following. And so part of what I hope I can communicate to listeners is that that the most important thing that Mr. Rogers taught us is that he liked us just the way that we are. And if that's the voice, if that's the, the narrative, if that's the story that we can tell ourselves, that even in our failures we are loved and appreciated, if we can start having that be what plays in our heads, I think this world would be so much kinder and so much more welcoming and and hospitable than it is right now. And I'm saying that just starting with myself. I'm not able to be patient and kind to myself most days. And that is the first point of struggle. We're taught in the Gospels that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. But some days we even struggle with loving ourselves. And that has to be where we begin. We have to understand, not in a selfish way, but in just an accepting way, that we are growing and we are changing and that we are all right as we are, doing the best we can right now. And I mean, I hope that as the days go by, that's the voice that I hear and not the negative voices that I so often have trapped in my head.

Yes, and that's very good. And I just wanted to add one more thing before we go to the next segment of our show. Maybe if we can also kind of become mindful mindful in our lives of those things that are making us impatient. And as you have already said, you know, if we can become mindful of maybe those voices that are telling us other things, sometimes it can help us if maybe we can identify, maybe even write those things down sometimes and just say, all right, these are some triggers for me, and I need to maybe work on how to get around these things or how to to spend time in different spaces. But patience is something I think we all need to work on. But boy, is it rewarding. And when we can actually learn to be people who take time, I think that life becomes much more rich than we would have dreamed it would have been. So, David, thank you very much for being on the show again today. I really appreciate it. And for our listeners, I just want to remind them once again, if you go to our podcast website. You can either enter in fredrogerspodcast.com with no www. at the beginning. If you just do fredrogerspodcast.com, or you can go to welcomeneighbor.podbean.com. You can find more about David in the show notes and some things that will take you to what he is doing. But I always appreciate you stopping by. Thank you for coming and having a visit here in the neighborhood today.

Rick Lee James, thank you for having me. It's great to be with you.

This is how the dictionary defines patience: the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset. How did Fred Rogers exhibit patience? What did he teach us about patience? I think that Fred Rogers must have had a gift for being patient, and by that I don't mean that it just happened. A person can have a gift for something, but that doesn't mean that the gift doesn't need to be cultivated. Since I'm a musician myself, and since Fred Rogers too was a musician, let me use playing an instrument as an illustration of this. There are people in this world who seem to have a gift for making music on their instruments. Fred Rogers had a gift for this, certainly, but being gifted doesn't mean it just happens. If you are a gifted piano player, it is because you have spent hours rehearsing, memorizing, sweating through difficult pieces, and doing the hard work of learning how to play your instrument. Part of your gifting in music is your drive to learn how to play well. If a person has no desire how to learn, it doesn't matter that they have talent. They will never really learn to play well or have a gift because they don't want to do the work of becoming a gifted musician. A person who has a gift for music is a person who is willing to follow through to push through the hard parts until they can ultimately play well. And that's what I mean by a person having a gift. Mr. Rogers seemed to have a gift for patience, and it was a gift that he cultivated. You might have some natural ability in music, in athletics, in academics, or in a number of other things, but if you don't have the determination to follow through and perfect that ability, then you won't be seen as a person who is gifted in that area. Fred Rogers did the hard work of cultivating his gift of being a patient person, and because he did, we can see that it was a gift in his life. In Amy Hollingsworth's excellent book, The Simple Faith of Mr. Rogers, She recounts her first visit to the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. During this time, Fred was taping a series of episodes on fast and slow. While trying to show an appreciation for both modes, she says, "The balance definitely tilted in favor of slow." In these episodes, Daniel Tiger felt insufficient because he couldn't say his alphabet set faster. When Mayor Maggie sang the song "Peace and Quiet" too quickly, it seemed rushed and out of sync because it wasn't in the natural rhythm of the song. Picture Picture showed crane operators and other workers who had to go slow in order to do their jobs. Even Trolley was used as an example, alarming everyone in the neighborhood as it sped by at a speed much much faster than normal. Well, Amy Hollingsworth asked Fred why he so often emphasized slowing the pace and taking some time to reflect. She remembers that before Fred answered her question, he paused, of course, and then he said, "I think for me, I need to be myself." He paused again. And I've never been a kind of hyperactive runaround person. I think one of the greatest gifts that we can give anybody is the gift of one more honest adult in that person's life, whether the recipient be a child or an adult. And so for me, being quiet and slow is being myself, and this is my gift It seems to me, though, that our world needs more time to reflect about what is inside, and if we take time, we can often go much deeper, as far as our spiritual life is concerned, than we can if there's constant distraction, noise, and fast-paced things, which doesn't allow us to take time to explore deeper levels of who we are and who we can become. It seems like patience and silence went hand in hand together in the life of Fred Rogers. Patience is not about doing nothing, and silence is not just the absence of noise. Patience and silence are activities in which we must choose to participate. Running a farm and harvesting food is an activity of patience You can't simply plant a seed one day and then have food on your plate in the next instant. To grow crops, farmers need to understand local growing conditions. After deciding what to grow, farmers often till the land by loosening the soil and mixing in nutrient fertilizers. Then they sow seeds. And when the crops are growing, farmers must water. Weed, and kill crop pests. And once the crops are mature, the farmer will harvest them. Well, farmers also need resources to grow food, such as land, air, nutrients, water, and sunlight. Farmers themselves need energy so they can continue to work the land. I believe that Fred Rogers was trying to teach us that a harvest of patience can only be produced by working in the soil of silence. It doesn't seem like this would be the case, but silence, and its close relative, patience, require discipline. It's true. We've talked about the self-discipline of Fred Rogers on past episodes of Welcome to the Neighborhood, the way he woke up early every morning to spend time in quiet Bible study and prayer, the way he would daily swim laps in order to intentionally maintain the weight of 143 pounds. He did not smoke or drink. He napped daily as he could. He went to bed at 9:30 PM, and sleeping 8 hours per night without interruption was very important to him. The discipline of of prayerful silence and rest that started and ended each day in the life of Fred Rogers fueled the productive activity and the patient demeanor that shone out of his life. I want to return to Amy Hollingsworth's book once more. Again, the book is titled The Simple Faith of Mr. Rogers. She says, one time on his program, Fred invited Sylvia Earle to the neighborhood. Sylvia was a noted marine biologist and explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society. Fred wanted to demonstrate the noises that fish make as they're eating, so Sylvia brought an underwater microphone to place in the aquarium to demonstrate. Once the equipment was set up, the cameras began rolling, but the camera-shy fish refused to eat. Come on, Sylvia coaxed. Chow time! Dinner bell! Of course, the fish ignored her. Sylvia then told Fred that these particular fish are such noisy eaters that some people can hear them without a fish phone. But still, there was only silence. Usually they have very good appetites, Sylvia said again. But the fish weren't listening. Most crew members shooting on the set thought that this episode was turning into a disaster and assumed that Fred would want to re-tape the segment with a different aquarium and much less media-shy fish. But Fred didn't. Again, I'm quoting Amy Hollingsworth here: Waiting on the fish was a lesson in patience, and he was instilling an appreciation for their quietness as well as their noises. If we can learn to wait through the natural silences of life, he liked to say, we will be surprised by what awaits us on the other side. Fred always allowed time for silence. The older he got, the more he saw the need for it, he said. At the end of the myriad of commencement speeches he delivered, while accepting an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, in presentations at the White House, and even in Christmas cards, which said, "May you be blessed with moments of silence and hope at Christmas and always," the thing Fred Rogers shouted the loudest was silence. I think Fred Rogers' trade was not simply being a host of a kids' program, Patience and silence was the trade that he learned. It was the trade that he cultivated. And it was the trade that he taught us how we can learn, too. Thank you, Fred Rogers, for teaching us how to take a breath.

What kinds of things do you do when you're waiting? I sometimes just sit and breathe in and breathe out.

In.

Out.

And I just think, in.

In and out.

One of my favorite Fred Rogers quotes: Mutually caring relationships require kindness and patience. Tolerance, optimism, joy in the other's achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain. To read more about Mr. Rogers' practice of patience cultivated from silence, pick up a copy of the book book, The Simple Faith of Mr. Rogers, written by Amy Hollingsworth. We'll have the link on our website at welcomeneighbor.podbean.com. Thank you for joining us here this week in the neighborhood. Music featured on the podcast was was Nouvelle Noel by Kevin MacLeod, and all other music by Benjamin Tausett at bensound.com. Special thanks to my guest David Dalt and the Mr. Rogers Say community on Twitter. I'm your host, Rick Lee James. My Twitter account is @RickLeeJames. My website is rickleejames.com. My other podcast is Voices in My Head, the Rick Lee James podcast. I look forward to being with you again next time. Until we meet again, remember, you make each day a special day.

You know how?

By just being you. There's only one person in this whole world like you, and people can like you exactly as you are.