There’s one essential ingredient to living in this city for the next five years – and that’s patience.

Taking a walk along the river? You need patience to find your way around the footpath barriers at multiple points of one of our city’s defining features.

Wandering from South Bank down to the galleries? You need patience to find your way around the construction sites of a new theatre and the new metro bus network.

Waiting for a bank or government department or pretty well any corporation to answer your call? You need patience (and a phone signal that doesn’t drop out at the crucial moment).

We’re rapidly reaching the end of the first quarter of this century which we earnestly believe has delivered the greatest disruption to our lives of any other period of time. So it’s no wonder we need to apply our own level of patience to the world we confront.

We started the century with an unrealised threat of technology breakdown (remember Y2K) and have passed through an Islamic terror attack on the western citadel of Manhattan, the greatest delivery from poverty in history through China’s growth and the simultaneous licence given to would-be autocrats to undermine and usurp democracies, the awful natural disaster of a tsunami, the manmade disaster of climate change and the ongoing consequences of a pandemic that took too many lives.

And all this has happened at a hell of a pace, depicted as the work of Moore’s Law – the characterisation of technology given by the scientist Gordon Moore who died last week but observed 20 years ago that the speed and capacity of a microchip doubles every two years.

It’s little wonder we’re collectively exhausted and a little bit cranky and impatient with the world we’re living in. Because while the physics haven’t changed, it just feels like the globe is spinning more quickly.

Easter is an early wake up call to the year that’s ticking away beneath us and a reminder to concentrate on what matters, to slow down a little, to show a little patience with the circumstances that feel like they’re spiralling out of control.

In fact, patience may be the personal characteristic that gets us all better through the next quarter of this century. It may also be we have little choice in a world where it’s difficult to speak to a person in a government department or corporation who might be able to fix our specific problem.

At a personal level, it means patience with the shopper whose need is so urgent they must cut us off to get the 138th last parking space in the shopping centre.

Patience with the tradesman who’s so busy that the 10 am appointment you’ve waited for stretches out to 2pm.

Patience with the scammers who now message multiple times daily to ask payment for a traffic toll, a better electricity deal, the collection of a parcel or emergency payment to a relative (now deceased) who has apparently run out of money at the shopping centre.

Patience with the neighbours who don’t even mention they are planning a renovation which will take longer than the gestation of a giraffe (14 months) and require a fleet in the street bigger than the Spanish Armada (130 ships) of double cab utes with trailers and trucks.

And then there are those matters outside our individual lives.

The construction boom and resulting disruption in the CBD at the moment is just a forerunner of what the Games will bring as 2032 approaches. We need patience with both the building and the bickering that will result.

If you’re interested in how public money is spent (and we all should be), you’ll need patience to see the inland rail link between Melbourne and Brisbane complete – latest estimate according to the review published last week is 2031, cost is $30 billion (double that originally proposed) and it will finish in Ipswich, not Brisbane.

Then there are the little things. If you’re intrigued, as I’ve expressed through this column, about the probity issues raised over a major investor in Queensland’s casino industry, you’ll have to be patient. I wrote sardonically last November that a review announced in August would probably take until Easter. And here we are, the eggs delivered and mainly eaten, and still no outcome. But the wheels are still rolling.

The world’s got faster but so much of what we do seems to take so much longer and not deliver on the promise. Patience helps. It’s not just a virtue but a necessity.