What they overlook is the time factor. The ongoing furor surrounding the Brexit issue is filled with impatient demands for deadlines, cut-off dates, final decisions, clean breaks and clear solutions, the latest being that everything must be settled by Oct. 31
But real life is not like that. What is forgotten is that everything evolves, everything takes time, everything changes through time. This applies as much to relations between nations as it does within societies and even within families. You can no more order a living, shifting, pattern of interfaces between societies and peoples to take a new shape on a particular day than you can order a plant to bear fruit on a specific day or to produce new buds at a specific moment.
Of course you can always take an ax to a living entity, and that is what populists and demagogues impatiently demand in the Brexit case. That is what Nigel Farage and his cohorts are loudly calling for in Britain, highly skilled, as they are, at publicity but novices in statecraft. The opinion-formers and proponents on all side in the matter of Brexit could do with some lessons in patience from Eastern cultures and some lessons in gardening from their neighbors.