There was a book at work last month, a genuinely unremarkable donated volume from the 1930s, nothing rare, nothing valuable in the market sense, but a signature had detached almost entirely from the spine and my job was to stabilize it without doing anything irreversible, since the whole ethic of conservation is minimal intervention, do only what’s needed and nothing more permanent than that. It took most of an afternoon. Four hours, more or less, on one book, on one problem, moving at a pace that would look to an outsider like barely moving at all.

I came home that same evening and got genuinely irritated, out loud, at a card sleeve that wouldn’t sit flush on a game card. Ninety seconds of frustration over a plastic sleeve, after an entire afternoon of patient, careful, unhurried work on something actually fragile. I noticed the gap between those two reactions almost immediately and it bothered me more than the sleeve did, because it’s not like I don’t have the patience, I clearly have an enormous reserve of it, I’d just spent it all somewhere else and had nothing left over for something genuinely trivial.

I’ve thought about this more than the moment probably deserves. Part of it, I think, is that at work the patience is professional, it’s what I’m there for, and it doesn’t cost me anything personal to access it because it’s not really mine, it’s the job’s. At home the same instinct has to come out of a different account, the one that’s also supposed to cover everything else in an evening, and by the time I get to a stubborn card sleeve at nine at night that account is sometimes just empty, even though objectively a torn book spine is a far harder problem than a sleeve.

What I’ve actually started doing about it, small as it sounds, is trying to notice when I’m about to get short with something low stakes and asking myself whether I’d extend the same person, or the same object, the four hours I gave that 1930s book without a second thought. Usually the answer is that the sleeve doesn’t need four hours, it needs me to breathe for ten seconds and try it from a different angle, which is embarrassingly often all it actually takes. I got the sleeve on eventually. The book at work is stable and sitting in a climate controlled room where nobody will touch it again for years, possibly decades. Both of those things can be true, and I’m trying to get better at remembering that patience isn’t a fixed amount you either have or don’t, it’s something you keep choosing to spend, on purpose, on whatever’s actually in front of you.