Patience

It is about time to speak about the holy, powerful, and subtle patience. The first impulse is to vomit all our emotions, soaked in our yearnings, through the filter of intellect. We are pervaded by anxiety and therefore pretend immediate results. Might this be a result of our getting, as kids, everything we wanted instantaneously and not having had the opportunity of developing patience?. This could be the reason, or it may lie elsewhere. Either way, we find ourselves, here and now, under the mantle of anxiety. But, wouldn't it be better to allow each thing to develop at its own natural rhythm, without imposing a pressure that can otherwise hinder its organic growth?

So I then tell myself: Be patient. Mind tends to lose focus and has a tough time concentrating. However, we are more than our minds; we are our minds, our emotions, desires, and needs. We are the calm and the storm, the waves in the sea and the sea itself. You can achieve patience if such is your wish. Be calm when carrying out your work, when relating with others, when living with your own self. Act just in the precise moment, before and after it continue observing full of patience... and be witness of the miracle.

Patience is for me a kind of implicit habit deeply rooted in my unconscious. But, why? This is the question from which I will set out my research.

Following on from my readings, I find that patience helps us in controlling our temper, tolerating adversity, and, moreover, in learning from it instead of suffering it. Patience dispels anxiety... I have some doubts regarding this, but let's go on with the investigation.

“If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.” Isaac Newton

I agree that patience is a kind of virtue that promotes our advance. However, I find a potential risk from the emotional point of view: to confuse repression with patience. If developing our patience should imply not expressing our emotions, I consider that we would not be doing any good to ourselves; on the contrary, we would be creating a lump with which we might suffocate.

I can be emotionally affected, naturally. But this isn't a reason to panic. It should not be a reason for neither repression of overacting. If they happen to be there I can allow myself to experience them without adding any overburden or mental stimulation. I can let them be. I can be the actor that lets them go through me during the time they exist, while being the observer that witnesses how they come and eventually pass by. Because I am well aware that everything, including emotions, are temporary and transitory. The only way they can remain present is by my clinging to them and repressing my true nature made of change and motion.

Patience is a necessary virtue in order to achieve whatever we wish. The instantaneous result does not exist. Everything is subject to a process and its time depends on its nature, not on our anxiety. One cannot plant a seed and expect to see it sprout, grow, and bloom in the moment. It is a natural process that requires of its own rhythm. Through patience we can learn from our desires, emotions, ideas, and needs. Everything comes to he who knows how to wait.

“Whenever it rained, it finished by clearing up.” Spanish proverb

So we are starting to see that patience has a lot to do with acceptance. To come to terms with the fact that each one of us has its own process, that our own rhythms exist, the rhythms of the others, the rhythms of projects, of nature, of each relationship and circumstance. Beyond our sensorial perception we can be conscious of the other's existence, and by that we can learn how not to impose our will, how to be patient. Sometimes pressure, rather than an impulse, can turn into an obstacle.

And then comes the time in which I undertake the rough task of separating the specific and objective fact from the developments of my imagination. I can of course have expectations and wish for a certain situation to occur, but I must nonetheless make a difference between my fantasy and reality. I allow myself to imagine and desire, however, I surrender to time and its doings. Because time is the substance from which life is made, and by respecting time I am respecting the life in me and the life in the others; I am respecting life.

There is a Chinese proverb that goes: “If you manage to be patient in a moment of rage, you will have escaped to a hundred days of sorrow”.

Finally, I begin to admit that action equally plays an important part. Because patience should not be a synonym of apathy or inaction. The patience I am beginning to discern has rather to do with an effective and quick action in the precise moment, not before, not after. Before and after are the realms of patience, but in the precise moment, just like a Samurai, I jump into action.

I am responsible for myself and the life I build around me. I can let myself go into the flow of emotions and not be patient – I have done so countless times. But I know that the reason I fell so many times into impatience was for me to learn from it. To learn the value of details. To stop competing against myself, to withdraw from the race against my emotions and anxieties. Because today, as I look back, I realise that the most wonderful things that ever happened to me came, not from pressing and forcing situations, but in a natural organic way: I imagined and acted surrounded by calm, and time made the rest to turn them real.

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