Patience is alleged to be a virtue, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find many examples from real life where people view it as one.
Maybe there’s a case to be made for it when baking bread, but in pretty much every other walk of contemporary life, impatience rules the day.
Employees never get rewarded by employers for asking the boss to be patient about completing a project; students aren’t encouraged to be patient when it comes to submitting assignments; we don’t ask the barista to be patient in filling our orders for double lattes; and who has ever wanted to exercise patience when the possibility of sexual intimacy is at hand?
So, it’s something of a mystery as to why patience has earned a reputation as something desirable; perhaps it has a good press agent. If so, however, you can be certain that such a successful representative exercises little, if any, patience in getting the word about patience’s virtues out to the world at-large.
When you sit in meditation practice, you get to notice how impatient you really are. And then you get impatient about being impatient and can’t wait until the impatience goes away. Under normal circumstances, you’d make an effort to stop being impatient as quickly as possible. But presumably, the lesson here is to simply observe one’s desire for what’s next and wait patiently to see what happens.
Fat chance.
One important question is whether in order to be patient, you have to be waiting for something. Suppose, for instance, you are told to be patient until dinner is ready, but in the meantime, you start reading a book, get really into it, and forget about dinner altogether. Are you still being patient, or are you just doing something else?
Or, perhaps you are reading this, patiently waiting for an important point to be made or an amusing phrase to be turned. But now that it’s over, have you really been patient at all?
Maybe there’s a case to be made for it when baking bread, but in pretty much every other walk of contemporary life, impatience rules the day.
Employees never get rewarded by employers for asking the boss to be patient about completing a project; students aren’t encouraged to be patient when it comes to submitting assignments; we don’t ask the barista to be patient in filling our orders for double lattes; and who has ever wanted to exercise patience when the possibility of sexual intimacy is at hand?
So, it’s something of a mystery as to why patience has earned a reputation as something desirable; perhaps it has a good press agent. If so, however, you can be certain that such a successful representative exercises little, if any, patience in getting the word about patience’s virtues out to the world at-large.
When you sit in meditation practice, you get to notice how impatient you really are. And then you get impatient about being impatient and can’t wait until the impatience goes away. Under normal circumstances, you’d make an effort to stop being impatient as quickly as possible. But presumably, the lesson here is to simply observe one’s desire for what’s next and wait patiently to see what happens.
Fat chance.
One important question is whether in order to be patient, you have to be waiting for something. Suppose, for instance, you are told to be patient until dinner is ready, but in the meantime, you start reading a book, get really into it, and forget about dinner altogether. Are you still being patient, or are you just doing something else?
Or, perhaps you are reading this, patiently waiting for an important point to be made or an amusing phrase to be turned. But now that it’s over, have you really been patient at all?
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