If at an advanced age, a person realizes that they have made no communication of their ideas, then patience would have failed them. If a futurist who wants to change the world and doesn't see his ideas being carried out in the present in any way, then his patient methods have failed him.
Let me give an example. Suppose a rich futurist wants to change the world, but realizes he can't really do that much. So, he puts all his money into building a small microcosms of what a changed world would be like: a city of creative works of vegetarian restaurants, theaters, and factories.
His microcosm would be vegetarian, and have a district for all the canines and felines rescued from pounds, and have factories for spirilina growth, tofu manufacturing and other naturalistic ideas -- hopefully even some approaching the ideas of other forms of biodegradable technology. Anything to get the spirit of his ideas moving in the present, and moving not on paper, but in life.
With patience he may have taken the road of creating some ideas of the town here and there, perhaps making a vegetarian restaurant somewhere where there was none, and perhaps creating a new type of a haven for pound animals. He could to let the ide as grow. But where is the spirit of the virtue of urgency ? With urgency we have no time to sulk, we just try to do something. All this is ultimately a description of what we do with our own life.
But now seeing he has no money left he has generated his own microcosmos regardless. His structure is so unique that now it is a dimension packed with power. It becomes something to other worlds, like a gem in a car lot of pebbles. He decides to let the town ride, setting up the funds and publicity campaigns to make it a worldwide attraction.
Patience will be the virtue that keeps our trust in virtue, yet there is no power in a universal application of waiting. Patience is both the meme that sustains our highest being and also lulls the apathetic to sleep. And as Rollo May said, "The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy."
