From the chapter "Patience" of Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are:

I see patience as one of these fundamental ethical attitudes. If you cultivate patience, you almost can't help cultivating mindfulness, and your meditation practice will gradually become richer and more mature. After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself. It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. ...

Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn't mean that you can't hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.

... which brings to mind my need to re-read Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and to pay special attention to some of the more philosophical sections—particularly those with immediate applications to trail running (and not falling down!). For example, from the section "His Eccentric Education":

He was not in a hurry, "hurry" being one human concept he had failed to grok at all. He was sensitively aware of the key importance of correct timing in all acts—but with the Martian approach: correct timing was accomplished by waiting. He had noticed, of course, that his human brothers lacked his own fine discrimination of time and often were forced to wait a little faster than a Martian would—but he did not hold their innocent awkwardness against them; he simply learned to wait faster himself to cover their lack.

(cf. Marry the One (2005-05-20), ...) - ^z - 2008-12-14