by M J Ryan
If I had been able to keep my patience and not launch into crisis mode, I would have been much more useful to Ana in the moment, and better able to decide whether to rush her to a hospital or help her go back to sleep. Rather than waiting sixty seconds for the facts—her temperature had not risen—I told myself something terrible was happening and set off my inner panic button.
Patience helps us make better decisions because it keeps us out of scary stories that cloud our judgment. At the end of the wonderful movie Amelie, there's a hilarious scene where she's finally reaching out to the man she loves and has sent him a message to meet her at a certain time and place. He doesn't show. Amelie decides there are two possibilities why: (1) He didn't get her message. (2) He was run over by a car, in a train wreck, shot, kidnapped, and sent to Afghanistan, only to end up alone on a mountaintop. It's a great moment because we can all relate. Scaring ourselves with disastrous scenarios is so typically human—and so injurious to our capacity to make good choices.
With patience, we approach life like this: something is happening, it may have a bad outcome, but then again it might not. Good or bad, I can deal with it. Getting upset about it will only make it worse, particularly in advance. As Mark Twain once said, “The worst troubles I've had in my life are the ones that never happened.”
I don't know about you, but I have spent a great deal of time fretting over things that never came to pass because I wasn't able to wait calmly to see how things turned out. So it's been a great relief to me to find that the more I develop my patience, the calmer I feel. And the calmer I feel, the better I am able to gather the data before spiraling into unnecessary worry and panic.
If practicing patience brings me no other reward than the ability to make better decisions, particularly in a crisis, it will have been well worth the effort.
PATIENCE CONNECTS US TO HOPE
Patience is the art of hoping.
LUC DE VAUVENARGUES
Jailed for fighting against apartheid, Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in South African prisons. In all those long years, in degrading conditions of abuse and starvation (upon his arrival on the infamous Robbins Island prison, guards urinated on him and said, “Here you will die”), he never turned bitter toward whites. He never gave up on his dream of a society in which blacks and whites could live in freedom and harmony. And he never stopped hoping that someday he would be released.
He believed, he wrote in a prison memoir, that “someday I would once again feel the grass under my feet and walk in the sunshine as a free man.” To him, hope meant “keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair.”
It is a custom in his tribe that grandfathers name their grandchildren, and when his oldest daughter, whom he had not seen for almost two decades, gave birth to a girl, Nelson Mandela named her Azwie—Hope. “The name had special meaning for me,” he wrote in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, “for during all my years in prison hope never left me—and now it never would. I was convinced that this child would be part of a new generation of South Africans for whom apartheid would be a distant memory.”
After ten thousand days, at the age of seventyone, Nelson Mandela was finally freed and went on to guide South Africa to true democracy, without the wholesale slaughter of whites by blacks that the minority white population feared. “I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur,” said Mandela. “I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity . . . Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.”
The life of Nelson Mandela is one of the greatest examples of the power of patience. With calm persistence, he helped bring about a miracle not only for himself, but also for the 43 million other blacks and whites who inhabit South Africa. In his presidential inaugural speech, he praised the “ordinary, humble people of this country. You have shown such a calm, patient determination to reclaim this country as your own.” He could have been talking about himself.
Under extreme duress, Nelson Mandela was able to tap into something profound in the human spirit: our capacity to hope, which allows us to work patiently toward a goal that we may never see.
“If we hope for what we don't see, we wait for it with patience,” says Romans 8:25. With hope, we have the patience to work for what we want in our lives—to study for the test, write the book, make the quilt, plant the garden—because we trust in the possibility of a good outcome. Without hope, we would try nothing, do nothing, because we wouldn't have the emotional and spiritual wherewithal to apply the necessary elbow grease and wait upon the results.
Scientific research has confirmed the connection between hope and patience. Students who score high on a hope index do better as college freshmen than their low-hope peers, though they have the same range of intellectual abilities. The reason has to do with persistence—hope gave them the willingness to keep on trying. In another study, high- and low-hope students were given a hypothetical situation: you were aiming for a B in this course. On your first test, which represents 30 percent of your final grade, you got a D. Now what do you do? The high-hope students came up with all kinds of ideas to raise their grade; low-hope students gave up.
Author Iyanla Vanzant encourages us to remember “that a delay is not a denial.” What is your heart's desire? Is it worth hoping for? With patience, we nurture hope in the darkness of our waiting, so that one day our heart's desire may burst forth, fully realized.
PATIENCE HELPS US LIVE LONGER AND MORE STRESS-FREE
Your biography becomes your biology.
CAROLINE MYSS
A friend was visiting. An advisor to the CEO of a large corporation, he had a very stressful job—which he had just decided to quit. “It's killing me,” he confided. “My blood pressure is through the roof and I am thoroughly burned out. I ignored my body as long as I could, but when my doctor warned me that I was at risk of having a heart attack, I paid attention. All I do is fight with [the CEO], pushing for what I think is right. And then he ignores my recommendations anyway. I've lost my tolerance for it.”
I could not find any research into the physiological effects of patience. But there are many studies on the effects of impatience, particularly stress and anger. Research demonstrates that angry folks are one and a half times more likely to get cancer than others and have a four to five times higher risk of heart disease. The biological effects of anger and stress include increased heart rate, surging blood pressure, and more stomach acid, whether you suppress or express your feelings.
If you do vent, your brain gets even more worked up, sending the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol surging through your bloodstream to prepare you to fight. This, scientists have found, has the effect of weakening your immune system, particularly your T-cells, which are the body's main infection fighters. Muscles contract, blood vessels constrict, and your heart has to work harder to circulate your blood. That's why you have the sensation of a pounding heart.
Conversely, when you are calm, your fight-orflight system turns off. Your muscles relax, your blood vessels dilate, your blood pressure drops, your heart rate slows. Your immune system functions well again, producing the requisite number of T-cells, which ward off disease and help you live a longer, healthier life.
Patience allows us to keep our cool under stress, whether it is the external stress of our busy lives or the internal stress of anger. It takes the foot off the accelerator of your nervous system and allows it to rest. As Robert Sapolsky points out in Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, the fight-or-flight response is an important one for our survival—it helps us run away from danger, for instance. But it is designed for short bursts, not to be chronically on.
Given our current lifestyles, we could be experiencing fight-or-flight almost all the time—in traffic, under a tight work deadline, in spats with loved ones—which puts a great deal of strain on
our bodies. That's why cultivating patience is one of the best things we can do for our health. The more we can easily roll with the punches of life and tolerate the quirks of other human beings, the less stress we will experience. And if that means one less day a week at the gym, won't that be a gift!
PATIENCE HELPS US WASTE LESS TIME, ENERGY, AND MONEY
With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.
CHINESE PROVERB
Years ago, the man I was living with and I built a house on a steep upslope lot. Actually, he built the house and I worked to support the family. The only part he didn't do himself was the foundation. The contractor slated to do the foundation work was overcommitted. In a rush to finish before the rains came, he didn't make it square or put it in the place on the lot where it should have been. And in a rush to get started before the rains came, we didn't check it.
If you were to visit that house now, you'd see a wall rising forty feet in the air, with a big step in it about one third of the way up to accommodate the fact that the foundation was out of plumb. That error cost us—in aesthetics and in trouble with the neighbors because the house wasn't located on the agreed upon spot. We ended up in years-long wrangles that took time, money, and energy.
That was a very big error brought on by lack of patience. But I experience all sorts of little ones all the time. I do something in a hurry, cut corners, make a mistake, and then have to start all over again.
It happened again last night. In my usual rush, I was putting together a complicated mango dressing for dinner. The last ingredient was salt. Not paying close enough attention, I put in way too much. I ended up having to throw the dressing away and start over again. Then I was not only annoyed that I had lost time, but aggravated at myself for rushing in the first place.
That was a silly error that cost me about ten minutes and one dollar. But how much time and money do we lose collectively through impatience? NASA comes to mind. Rushing on a project, they did some of their calculations in centimeters and some in inches, so a multimillion-dollar satellite completely missed its target. Oops!
These days we value speed so much that we now take such colossal errors for granted. Think of the media, which jumps to conclusions on stories before the facts are even in. “Dewey Wins!” is the famous blooper, but remember the flip-flopping on Election Night 2000? The TV networks just couldn't tolerate not declaring a presidential winner. Software manufacturers now, as a matter of course, put out programs they know are bug-filled and respond to customer complaints, rather than taking the time to work the kinks out first. Why? Because impatient investors will cause their stock price to plummet if they announce that they are not going to make their deadline.
Impatience can hurt us physically too. “Whenever I injure myself,” a woman wrote to me, “I can invariably look back and see that it happened while I was rushing. I sprained an ankle running for the bus. I pulled out my back racing through a workout, trying to get to the office ten minutes sooner. Both injuries ended up taking much more time than the few minutes I was rushing to save.”
It takes awareness to buck the fastness trend. But there are benefits. Remember the old adage “Haste makes waste”? It's as true now as the day it was coined. That's because, as my email correspondent pointed out, hurrying ends up taking more time because we make mistakes that we wouldn't have made if we'd just calmed down a little bit.
Given the hurry-up way we all live, perhaps we'd do well to change that old adage into one I heard recently from a wise woman, “Make haste—slowly.”
PATIENCE GETS US MORE OF WHAT WE WANT
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
ANONYMOUS
I was standing in line in Toronto, Canada, waiting to clear U.S. customs and fly home. My flight was due to take off in an hour and the line was moving slowly. Very slowly. I had been away for five days and my daughter, back home with a cold, was missing me terribly. The old me would have fumed and fussed, making myself and all those around me miserable.
This time, however, I decided to try an experiment. What would happen if I acted as though it would somehow work out? So I waited, inching along. After about thirty minutes, I struck up a conversation with the man in front of me. “At least we're almost there,” I remarked, eyeing the door ahead of us. “Oh no,” he said, “this is just the line to get into the line.”
About that time, a customs official came by to explain that their computers had been going on and off all day and that was why it was taking so long. I told myself to remain calm, holding the possibility of a good outcome. At fifteen minutes before take-off, the customs officials called out, “All those going to Denver, over here.” Off I went to wait in a shorter line.
Finally it was my turn. I walked up to the young woman at the computer. She looked tired. Very tired. I felt a surge of sympathy and I found myself saying, “Rough day, huh?” “Yup,” she replied, stamping my passport and waving me onward.
It was only then that I noticed that her computer screen was black. Her computer was down and she should have made me wait until it came back on to verify my passport. Because I had been kind to her, she let me through—just in time for me to make my plane.
That incident won't leave me alone. It made me see that when we practice patience, we increase the chances we will get what we want. That's because when we're patient, we treat other people decently, which in turn increases the possibility that they will respond in kind.
I was reminded of this recently when a friend told me of an experience she had with a repairman. Unhappy with the work he'd done, she wanted a refund. She had called up and yelled at the company, eventually hanging up on the person on the other end. “I then called my husband,” she reported, “who has more patience than I. He called, spoke calmly to the manager, and, surprise, got our money back.”
Since my customs incident, I've heard all kinds of stories about how patience will get you what you want: the man who got his computer back after leaving it in a plane seat pocket by being gracious to the ten airline folks he had to speak to in order to get to the right person; the owner of a crowded restaurant who jumped customers to the head of the line because they were nice about waiting; the couple who got their checking account fee waived because they were kind in dealing with a banking snafu.
I used to believe that the adage “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” was the one to follow, and boy was I squeaky. Now I realize that often all the squeaky wheel gets is a wide berth or a swift kick. These days, I'm using my patience to spread around more honey than vinegar and the results are much sweeter.
PATIENCE GUARDS THE DOOR TO ANGER
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.
MICHAEL LEFAN
It was one of those grocery store moments that you've likely witnessed. A mother, exhausted by a hard day of work and needing to pick up something for dinner, is racing through the aisles, three-year-old in tow. The child, hungry and tired, is pitching a fit. He wants a certain cereal that his mother has already vetoed for being too sugary. “I want too much sugar, I want too much sugar,” he yells, throwing himself down on the ground. Mom snaps, yanking him up by the arm and dragging him out of the store. Mom, son, and the shoppers observing the scene end up upset.
It was only when I began to study patience closely that I came to see how anger and patience are related. In fact, anger is the direct consequence of losing our patience. For it is precisely because we don't have tolerance for something or someone that we get mad: “Why must you crack your knuckles when you know it drives me crazy?” “Why do you say ‘lovely’ in that simpering voice to everything that happens?” “Why is the health insurance system in this country so screwed up that I can't get a policy for under $800 a month?” We're angry because we don't want to put up with it.
This was a big “aha” for me. I knew that I was often impatient and that I lost my temper sometimes. But I had no idea that the two were relate
d. They seemed like separate weather systems, operating independently of one another. But actually impatience is a continuum, beginning with irritation, leading to anger, and ending in rage.
What that means is that the converse is also true. The more patience we have, the less irritation, anger, and rage we'll experience. If the poor mother in the grocery store had been able to summon a bit more patience, she could have avoided striking out. Perhaps she could have laughed at the absurdity of her son's request for “too much sugar,” offered a distraction, or just stood there calmly until his tantrum ran its course. Any of those options would have been better—for him and for her.
This is not to say that all anger is bad. We should never put up with exploitation or abuse, and our impatience in that regard is a healthy warning signal that our limits have been violated and we need to seek a safe haven. And there's also virtuous anger when it comes to injustice of all sorts, including, for instance, the inequities of the U.S. health care system, that fuels social change.
What I'm talking about here is the normal irritation and anger we feel toward people, places, or events in our daily lives that come from a lack of reasonable tolerance. You know what I mean—the patience we need to deal with our parents when they seem not to care at all about what matters to us; the serenity to deal with our children when they're pushing for an ice cream cone or a tattoo after we've said no four times; the persistence to keep on trying with a boss who doesn't seem to value our work. Or even the patience to enlist someone to help with our health care problem rather than yelling at the poor person at the end of the telephone line. When we employ patience, we are much better judges of when it is time to rise up in righteous anger and when we should grin and bear something.