“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau
When I was a child,in the early ‘60s, my grandfather would take my sister, brother and me highbush blueberry picking for hours, in Lynn Woods. We would venture out on a summer evening, with our Clorox bleach containers cut out to hold the blueberries, a rope on the handles, one flung on the front and one on the back. It was expected that each of us would fill those gallon jugs,
Each time, I remember how daunting the task felt in the beginning, as we reached high for one, then two, and on and on….and if we groaned, Grampy would tell us to stick with it, and be patient, and before long we would have those jugs filled. He was right, and we always came back with enough for weeks of my mother’s blueberry pies, and my grandmother’s magical blueberry muffins. No one has been able to duplicate them since.
I was not a particularly patient child, and I grew into a not particularly patient adult. Having children took some edge off my impatience, out of necessity, but patience did not come naturally to me. I worked for years in therapy releasing the anger that lead to my hair trigger temper that got me into trouble more than once.
Over time, I observed some people displaying tremendous patience, and wondered what it was within them allowed them to remain so steady when I felt so riled and thus impatient inside about the very same things. I secretly admired them, and decided one year to make patience my word for the year.
The word patience comes from Old French pacience which means “patience; sufferance, permission.” Another definition is “a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” I do agree that being patient can at times lead one to feel despairing, which is why many people resist being patient. It can be a huge threat to the false security of the ego’s need for control.
In my quest to become a more patient person, I have learned so much about myself, my motivations, and my sense of entitlement. I have achieved once daunting tasks, such as writing a book, rebuilding a business, and getting my health back after a crash. There is a reason that Lao Tzu, the father of Taoism, said “I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.”
Here are some key pieces of wisdom about patience I have gathered along the way:
1- Patience is the antidote to arrogance, and connects you with other people.
2- Patience is a form of respect, and engenders respectful treatment from others.
3- Patience decreases your anxiety and allows you to be far more productive and finish what you started. If you have a task or project and begin from a place of patience with the process, without the need to “get things over with,” you will enjoy the process more and be more likely to stick with it. The ability to build or create something of value requires this kind of process-orientation, vs. the instant gratification of the modern world.
The rise in anxiety that coincides with the use of smartphones and constant texting, is no accident. There is no need to wait for an answer, and expectations that everything can be achieved instantly are reinforced over and over. We are actually conditioned to be impatient, as we are to feel anxious. Cultivating patience can off-set this negative effect of the digital world.
4- Patience allows for revelation rather than rash decisions. Because we live in a culture where concepts like procrastination are considered evidence of lack of commitment or laziness, we may attempt to override the need for a more organic process to unfold. Says poet David Whyte, “To hate our procrastinating tendencies is in some way to hate our relationship with time itself, to be unequal to the phenomenology of revelation and the way it works its own way in its very own sweet, gifted time, only emerging when the very qualities it represents have a firm correspondence in our struggling heart and imagination.” Imagine that—patience allows us to become the person capable of making important decisions and knowing great things.
5- Patience opens up a space for self-compassion. It is one thing to be patient with others, and another to be patient with one’s self. I find that being patient with myself translates into patience with others, but not always the other way around. Sometimes I extend more patience to others, and still have tendency to “push” myself where patience would be a far wiser choice. I have carried a card with a quote from one of my favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, in my wallet for over 40 years, and each time I read it, I become more patient. Rilke says, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
In my quest to become a more patient person. I have discovered that patience will always be a challenge for me, and that those naturally patient people I have met and admired possess a beautiful and precious gift I will never call my own. I can honestly say, however, that I find reason every day to continue my quest to become more patient, and that the quality of greater patience I have cultivated is what allows me to carry on with this worthy challenge.
May patience become a companion in all my tasks, and all my relationships.
May patience slow me down to the perfect pace that allows me to be most present to my life.
