the patience of Penelope

When Odysseus sailed away to the war at Troy, he left behind a young wife, Penelope, and a baby son. He was gone ten years to the fighting, and then ten more lost at sea, and in all that time no word came home to say whether he lived or lay drowned.

The years turned Penelope's house into a siege. A crowd of arrogant suitors moved into her halls, eating her stores, drinking her wine, and demanding that she give up her missing husband for dead and marry one of them. She had no army to drive them out — only her wits.

So she made them a promise. She would choose a new husband, she said, as soon as she had finished weaving a fine burial shroud for her old father-in-law. All day she sat at her great loom and wove, and the suitors waited. But each night, by lamplight, she quietly unpicked every thread she had woven that day.

For three long years the shroud was never finished, and the suitors never guessed why. She held them off with nothing but a loom and a patient, unbreakable will — until at last Odysseus came home in disguise, and the long waiting was rewarded.

To show the patience of Penelope is to wait like that: faithfully, cleverly, and without giving up, no matter how long the years or how loud the voices telling you to stop.