by M J Ryan
There's an Irish proverb that goes something like this: “When you are angry, you're carrying the burden while the other person is out dancing.” The more we cultivate patience, the less anger we carry and the more dancing we'll feel like doing.
PATIENCE GIVES US GREATER TOLERANCE AND EMPATHY
If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.
POOH'S LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK
I was leading a training session in diversity of thinking for a Fortune 100 company. I was explaining that, although we all have the same equipment—a brain—we don't all use it in the same way. Rather, each of us takes in and expresses the world in a unique way. Understanding those differences goes a long way toward explaining a lot of what frustrates us about colleagues, bosses, spouses, and kids.
A hand flew up. “You mean,” drawled one kindly gentleman from Louisiana, “my son isn't trying to defy me when he won't look me in the eye when I talk to him? And my boss isn't a jerk for not responding to my memos? That if I gave him my ideas verbally I'd have a much greater chance of success?”
“Yes,” I replied, “that's exactly what I mean.”
In the course of going about our business—at work, at home, at the grocery store, at community functions and private dinner parties—we bump up against people every day. And lo and behold—they're different from us. Not just in the ways that their brains take in information. They also have different priorities, motivations, histories, and cultures. We all know this in theory and in the name of tolerance, we say that it's good. But in fact, many of us don't really believe it. Consequently, we spend a great deal of energy trying to get the rest of the world to behave as we believe they should.
Remember the song from My Fair Lady, “Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?” It could be our personal anthem with a slight variation, “Why Can't Everyone Be More Like Me?” Alas, they are not and that's where patience comes in. It helps you to graciously put up with the differences between you and everyone else you come across.
This tolerance can be a challenge. It requires stepping back from our assumptions of how the other person should be and inquiring how they actually are. But we have a great ally in this process.
It turns out that patience, that calm inner steadiness in the face of what might otherwise annoy us, is the gateway to empathy, the capacity to be aware of the feelings of others. That's because, says Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence, “Empathy requires enough calm and receptivity so that the subtle signals of feeling from another person can be received and mimicked by one's own emotional brain.” In other words, the more patience we have, the greater our ability to feel for others.
With empathy, we get to see the other person for who he or she is in all his or her unique magnificence instead of trying to turn a person into someone else. Rather than being annoyed, for instance, that your teammate Fred moves so slowly, you can ask yourself what good might come from this trait. When you do, you see that he takes great care with everything he does and that's what his slowness is about.
This capacity, through patience, for empathy, has tremendous implications not only for us as individuals, but also as a global community trying to live together in peace. It is, argues researcher Martin Hoffman, the very basis of morality. For it is precisely because we can feel the pain and understand the position of others that we adhere to moral principles at all.
In this way, patience allows us to live more harmoniously—with family members who may be different, with neighbors who may have dissimilar priorities, with diverse teammates with whom we must work. Patience gives us a greater sense of wonder at the variety of human nature and a much greater capacity to open our hearts to it all.
PATIENCE HELPS US HAVE HAPPIER LOVE RELATIONSHIPS
Love is patient and kind.
ST. PAUL, FIRST LETTER TO THE CORINTHIANS
I have a friend who's a genius at falling in love. A tragic romantic, she calls herself. She has no trouble attracting a man, swooning in deep infatuation, and then rejecting him for some fatal flaw: too young, too short, not making enough money. She once told me that she couldn't marry this guy she was seeing because he left wet towels on the bathroom floor!
I used to consider some of her reasons to be silly, but eventually I came to see them as shorthand for this truth: she didn't love the person enough to put up with their flaws. None of them, for whatever reason, triggered her capacity for patience.
Fundamentally, you can't love without patience. Oh, as my friend experienced over and over, you can have the blush of first romance, that feel-good time when your brain is flooding your body with endorphins and all things between you feel possible. But when that glow fades and you, with all your idiosyncrasies, are face-to-face with this other human being with all of his or her idiosyncrasies and you are trying to negotiate a life together—that's when the rubber meets the road, patience-wise.
Over the long haul of a relationship, we each spend a great deal of time bearing with one another's faults: the fact that he belches in public; that she has periodic freak-outs over money; that his clothes never match and he's been wearing those shoes for over ten years; that she gets on the phone with friends as soon as she walks in the door rather than greeting you with a kiss.
People can and do change, but they rarely change as much as we desire. The secret to happiness in love may be to appreciate as delightful those little foibles that otherwise can be so annoying. Short of that heroic feat, which many of us never quite manage, it helps to haul out wheelbarrows full of patience for the times when he tells that old joke you've heard two thousand times before or when she comes home from yet another shopping spree.
What's fascinating about patience in love is that when we accept one another as we are, we actually increase the possibility of change. That's because our partner's patience produces a safe haven where we are accepted, warts and all, and in the warmth of that acceptance we may actually feel safe enough to risk growing. Thus, our partner may even end up changing in the ways we desire, precisely because we have given them the space to do so.
Patience also increases the chances that our relationships will last over the long haul. In a study of adults who had been high school underachievers (characterized by low persistence), it was found that they were 50 percent more likely to divorce in the thirteen years after high school than their classmates. In other words, people who don't use patience in one arena of their lives tend to give up on love sooner than those who learned stick-to-it-ness somewhere.
Patience is the mortar that holds love together, smoothing the surface between us so that love—and growth—can flourish.
PATIENCE MAKES US BETTER PARENTS
God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race—to enlarge our hearts; and to make us unselfish and full of kindly sympathies and affection; to give our shoulds higher aims; to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion.
MARY HOWITT
A busy journalist dad was trying to get his three-year-old daughter off to preschool on time. “I was getting impatient because she was laughing instead of putting on her socks. Finally I lost my temper and shouted, ‘Come on. I'm serious. No more laughing.’ ‘C'mon,’ she scolded in reply, wagging her finger at me as I had done and mimicking my frowning face exactly. ‘I'm very serious. No more laughing.’
“At that moment I realized just how far I'd gone, valuing speed over joy, and her serious act struck me as so hilarious that I started laughing myself. ‘Now look who's laughing,’ she deadpanned.”
Is there anything as cute as kids? They say such endearing things, cover you with kisses and hugs, want so badly to please you. Just being around them is a joy.
Is there anything as exasperating as kids? They spill grape juice on your brand new white carpet, ask the same questions over and over, and turn the ordinary tasks of living such as brushing teeth into ongoing power struggles.
Just being around them is a pain.
As every parent knows, raising children requires a smorgasbord of capacities. We must be teachers, disciplinarians, coaches, friends—and know when each of these needs to make an appearance. And we must often make split-second decisions as to how to respond while juggling a thousand other things.
If that weren't pressure enough, because we live in psychologically aware times, we know more about the damage we have the potential to inflict. One hundred years of research into emotional development reveals that we parents determine, at least to some degree, whether our children end up being high-functioning human beings with the capacity to succeed in love and work—or not.
One of our greatest allies in this complex process of parenting is patience. Patience allows us to continue rocking a child who's been crying for an hour, to read Horton Hears a Who for the four hundredth time, to respond calmly as our teen arrives home from a sleepover with purple hair.
I haven't known one day as a parent that my patience hasn't been tried—and I have a very easygoing child. Testing just goes with the territory. By the very nature of childhood, parents and children spend their lives together engaged in a struggle: children to constantly test how far they can go; parents to create a safe circle and expand it wisely as our children grow in maturity.
That's why patience is the pause that refreshes. It allows us to stop in this battle between independence and safety and assess what the best response might be. It allows us to think before we act, which is crucial in this relationship where we have such power.
Our kids are asking us for greater patience. In a 1999 study on work-life balance by Ellen Galinsky, it was found that the one thing most children wished they could change about their parents was that they be less stressed out when they get home from work.
No matter how hard we might try, we'll not be perfect parents. And that's OK—all we really need to do is to be good enough. Patience helps us be good enough—good enough so that our kind, loving, and wise responses outweigh our sharp, illconsidered ones.
PATIENCE TEACHES THE POWER OF RECEPTIVITY
Patience [is one of those] “feminine” qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Mary Beth lost her job on her forty-third birthday. The prior two years had been very difficult. Her marriage had ended. A magazine she had launched failed the year before. She was trying frantically to put her life back into some semblance of financial order, so the news of her unemployment struck hard.
“I had no job, three kids in Catholic schools, and a mortgage. I spent a month in a frenzy sending out resumes, calling colleagues, scouring ads. Nothing. The harder I searched, the more frustrating it became.
“Then, one September morning, I just stopped. I woke up, took my coffee out to my garden, and prayed: God, I've tried everything. It's in your hands now, whatever is meant for me. I decided that all I could do was to be receptive to whatever happened. I wrote stories and sent them off, unsolicited, to editors. Nothing happened. For months, after I got the kids off to school, I headed out to my garden to spend an hour in prayer, waiting. I waited long after my pumpkins were harvested, until a pink geranium put forth its last single bloom in December, until the whole garden became barren. I waited and prayed. I kept writing.
“Finally, in January, a dream job opened for me. By spring, all the stories I had written in the fall began appearing and the checks were in my mailbox again.”
When I first began to study patience, I was struck by how wimpy it seemed. Unlike kindness, gratitude, or generosity, which are about things you do, this quality is a lot about what you don't do. It's about holding back when you want to let loose, putting up with something you'd rather not, and waiting for something to happen rather than forcing it along.
As I thought more deeply, though, I began to see how my attitude was very much a reflection of the culture at large, one that values action above all else. As Americans we are all about doing: conquering the mountain; dominating the market; making money as quickly as possible; climbing to the top of the career ladder. These all represent actionoriented, dynamic activities, the energy of the masculine, as it were.
What we tend not to value in our culture are the more receptive, “feminine” activities: waiting on heaven; opening to intuition; listening for the right moment; allowing truth to penetrate and move us. Patience, as Simone de Beauvoir points out, belongs in the receptive range of responses.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with dynamic energy—we need it to bring about anything at all in the world. But we've gotten into a state of imbalance as individuals and as a society because we only value dynamic energy. We have little or no appreciation for the receptive, which is the place where we stop to reflect, to judge whether action is appropriate or not, to wait for the right timing. We think we're not “doing” anything when we are receptive.
However, the receptive energy of patience is real work! It takes effort to not simply run off and do something for the sake of doing it, to live in the unknown for as long as it takes without becoming angry, bitter, or depressed. It may look like nothing on the surface. But underneath, within ourselves, we're lifting some heavy timber. Taoists call this wu wei, actionless activity, also translated as “sitting quietly doing nothing.” In ancient China, wu wei was valued as one of the highest human achievements possible.
Mary Beth's story is powerful because, as it demonstrates, sometimes no amount of dynamic energy will get us what we want. At those times, all we can do is stop and wait patiently for the future to unfold. This capacity to wait expectantly, opening ourselves up to help from God or the universe, is what receptivity is all about.
Not everything can be accomplished through willpower—sometimes what we need is a bit of wait power.
PATIENCE IS THE HEART OF CIVILITY
Patience furthers.
LAMA SURYA DAS
A few years ago, a friend became mayor of her city of twenty-five thousand. She invited me to her swearing-in party, which was at the end of the regular city council meeting. I went early, sat through the meeting, and was soon overcome with admiration. What patience these city officials have to go through the same problems over and over again, trying to meet urgent needs with little money, pushed on all sides by special interest groups advocating for their position! I could tell in this one meeting that the issues on the table had been hashed and rehashed many times, but everyone treated one another with respect, and every citizen who wanted to be heard was, whether what they had to say was on the topic or not.
By the end of the evening, I inwardly bowed in awe toward all public officials for their patience with the process of government, as well as all those tireless citizen activists who unflaggingly advocate for what they believe is right. Then I began to think about the so many others who patiently work to keep our society together—all those laboring for pennies in nonprofits, police and firefighters, peace workers around the world, the list goes on and on.
I contrast those folks with people in a story that the newspapers were filled with a few years ago. After a van careened into a sidewalk injuring three pedestrians, seven men pulled the driver and passenger out of the van and beat them to death. This happened in a middle-income neighborhood in Chicago; the men accused of murder range in age from sixteen to forty-seven.
When I contemplate this horrific story from the lens of patience, what I'm struck by is not that it happened, but that it doesn't happen more often. These men couldn't wait for justice to take its course (the driver, a sixty-two-year-old man, was drunk), and instead took matters into their own hands, meting out their own form of “punishment.” It's newsworthy because it is unusual, since most of us, even those who have been harmed, have learned to wait on society's processes and procedures.
Indeed it is because most of us are able to use patience that society functions at all. Because we are willing to be patient, we wait for the lights to
turn green before we go rather than running the red; we wait calmly when going to a large event like a ball game or a concert, rather than trampling people to get in; we wait on our government to solve problems to the best of its ability rather than plotting an overthrow.
To the extent that we employ patience, society holds together, with the billions of us alive on the planet today going about the business of living in a more or less orderly and lawful way. It is when we become impatient—whether for a quick buck as in the corporate greed fest of the late nineties or in our cars on a crowded freeway—that lawlessness breaks out.
Patience is no small, feel-good personal quality. It is at the heart of diplomacy and civility, lawfulness and civil order. Without it, people can't work together and society can't function at all. With it, we create the possibility of peace between people and between nations.
PATIENCE GROWS OUR SOULS
We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.
HELEN KELLER
In her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, Rachel Naomi Remen tells the story of a surly teenage boy who was struggling with a diagnosis of childhood diabetes. He was acting out—not eating properly, not taking his medication. Then, one day, he came to her office, smiling. He'd had a dream. He told her, “In my dream, I saw a statue of a young Buddha. Just looking at it made me feel peaceful. Then, out of nowhere, a dagger came from behind me and went right into the heart of the Buddha. I was shocked, devastated. Then, as I watched, upset and angry, the Buddha began to grow. He grew and grew until he was the size of a giant. The knife was still there, but compared to the Buddha, it now was only the size of a toothpick.”