Waiting faster

“Waiting faster” is Mike’s name for accommodating human impatience without abandoning the Martian conviction that right timing comes through waiting. Rather than hurry, he adjusts his own waiting to meet others’ needs, making patience a practical expression of care.

Meaning and Practice

Mike regards hurry as a human concept he has not understood. He is nevertheless acutely attentive to timing in action; in the Martian approach, the right moment is reached by waiting. His human brothers, he observes, have less exact discrimination of time and are sometimes forced to wait faster than a Martian would. He does not blame them for this awkwardness. He learns to wait faster himself, compensating for their limitations rather than demanding that they adopt his pace.

Apparent Hurry, Actual Patience

The phrase contains a deliberate reversal: Mike can wait so efficiently that a human observer would think he was hurrying at breakneck speed. That appearance is mistaken. What looks like frantic haste is, from Mike’s perspective, patience adjusted with warmth to suit another person’s needs. The expression preserves both sides of the encounter: his own understanding of correct timing and his willingness to accommodate people whose sense of time differs from his.

Significance

“Waiting faster” makes patience active rather than inert. Mike does not simply insist that others wait according to his Martian measure; he changes his own conduct to cover the gap. The small adjustment exemplifies his broader effort to understand human ways without treating their difference as a fault, and gives the abstract idea of waiting a concrete, relational form.