The Power of Patience

by M J Ryan

  What an incredible attitude, I thought. To be able to welcome into our lives those who are the most trying to us because they will teach us patience.

  I was reminded of Kate's comment recently when I told a client of mine that I was writing a book on patience. He has a teenage daughter, Tina, who has had serious learning issues since birth. “You know,” he said, “I always used to pray for patience. And then God answered my prayers—he sent me Tina! And boy did I have to learn patience.”

  What Kate and my client taught me is that when we see those who challenge us as teachers rather than burdens, our patience instantly grows. We don't have to grit our teeth and simply bear it; we're learning something of value. We're learning how to love, to open our hearts, to grow beyond our previous limitations. This perspective makes life easier to go through. Rather than resisting what is happening to us, we use it as fodder to become wiser and kinder, rather than bitter or mean-spirited.

  There is a Tibetan teaching story that goes something like this: A monk was meditating by himself in a cave high in the mountains. One day a herdsman came back and, intrigued, asked the monk, “What are you doing here all by yourself?” “Meditating on patience,” replied the monk. The herdsman, turning to leave, shouted in response, “Well, you can just go to hell.” “Oh yeah,” the monk yelled back, “You go to hell!” The herdsman laughed all the way down the mountain.

  As this story illustrates, cultivating patience is meaningless unless we can use it when we need it. The herdsman was a great teacher, for he showed the monk his understanding was only intellectual. If the monk could see this teacher in that light, he would finally be truly on his way.

  By opening our hearts to the people and things that challenge us, we become spiritually and emotionally supple, less prone to being knocked over by whatever curves life throws at us. Difficult people and events become interesting opportunities for further growth, rather than threatening obstacle courses we must endure. From this place, we actually can enjoy life more, whatever is happening.

  ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

  Folks differs, dearie. They differs a lot. Some can stand things that others can't. There's never no way of knowin' how much they can stand.

  ANN PETRY

  A few years ago, I had a most dramatic experience with patience when I decided to sell my publishing business. Along came a potential buyer who was very interested. If he bought, I would have been well off for the rest of my life. If he didn't, the business might have had to declare bankruptcy.

  He moved incredibly slowly, but he did move forward. Every so often, I would call and see if I could speed things up, and he would assure me he was moving as fast as he could. I didn't have another buyer at that point; all the others had disappeared when we accepted this person's contingency offer. All I could do, for nine agonizing months, was wait until he finished the examination process and made up his mind.

  Often I would wake in the middle of the night and think, I may go bankrupt or I may never have to worry about money again. Poised between potential disaster and great gain, it seemed the best choice to wait.

  One of my problems with patience is that I am afraid my waiting button is out of whack. Some things I am willing to wait years for, others not even seconds. I'm not even sure what criteria I am using to judge whether patience is appropriate. But I do know this—there are many situations when you should say, “Enough. I will wait no longer.” As in, for example, “I won't wait any longer for you to stop drinking. I would rather leave you than watch you kill yourself.” Or “I will not put up with that person's physical and verbal abuse one more minute.” Or “We have been meeting for months now without moving forward. I think it's time to give up this business idea.”

  However, as Ann Petry suggests in the above quote, I can't tell you what the point is for you because I am not you. I can't even necessarily know for myself what that point is on an absolute scale because it varies with the situation. I do know that it is crucial for the practice of patience to know when to stop being patient. Only you can know that moment.

  Sometimes, I set a deadline in my mind in advance: I will do this for six months and then reevaluate. I have a business associate who has a three-meeting rule: if no forward movement has happened in three meetings, she's out of there. Other times, I use a bitterness indicator. If I've begun to be resentful, maybe it's time for me to say “no more.”

  But because so many situations call for patience beyond what we imagined, this is very tricky territory. Maybe we were being called on to wait just one more day, one more week, to try just one more thing. Books (like this one!) are full of stories of people who hung in there beyond all reasonableness and finally succeeded.

  That's why only you can judge for yourself in the quiet counsel of your own deepest wisdom. And you need to know your outer limits.

  I recently read a joke that captured this idea in a lighthearted way. An elderly couple has filed for divorce. The judge turns to them and says, “You mean to tell me that you are willing to throw in the towel after sixty-five years of marriage?” The wife turns to the judge and responds, “Your honor, enough is enough.”

  The end of my dramatic waiting story? The man did not purchase my business. Eventually someone else did and I ended up neither bankrupt nor rich. But I learned a great deal about what patience feels like. And I feel much better equipped to pull the patience plug if need be.

  BE HERE NOW

  Every moment a beginning. Every moment an end.

  MARK SALZMAN

  Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher who, in his youth, lived with intense anxiety and depression; often he considered suicide. Then, on his twentyninth birthday, he had a spontaneous enlightenment experience, which left him with a profound “undercurrent of peace” that remains to this day. What he experienced, he says, is the “power of now.”

  “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have,” he writes in his best-selling book, The Power of Now. Whatever pain or conflict we feel is “always some form of non-acceptance, some form of resistance to what is. . . . You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got.” When you come into the present moment as it truly is, there are no problems, “only situations—to be dealt with now, or left alone and accepted as part of the ‘isness’ of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with.”

  Tolle's words have profound implications for patience seekers. Think about a recent occasion when you lost your patience. Was it because a certain something was happening yet again? Again he leaves the room in the middle of your sentence. Again she forgets to pay the bills. Again you are left to clean up the mess.

  Or was it in some way a fear about the future, perhaps that you wouldn't get a project done on time or that your dreams would never come to fruition? Either way your loss of patience represented a stepping out of the present and either fretting about the past or worrying about the future.

  That's why one of the best attitudes to hold, when it comes to patience, is present moment awareness. Here I am in this moment. This moment, this one that has never happened before and will never come again. Impatience is always about the past (This has happened too many times before) or the future (When will what I want to happen happen?). Being in the present is about the now, where what is simply is.

  When we are truly in the present moment, we do not worry. There is nothing to strain toward or away from. We just are—in a line of cars on a rainy Sunday, hearing the buzz of a plane overhead. Sitting in front of a computer reading emails. Cooking dinner.

  Patience is the willingness to be in the now exactly as it is. Even if we wish or hope or pray that someday it will change, patience allows us to live as happily and contentedly as possible right now.

  That seems easy to do when life is going well. But it is also the secret to surviving adversity. The courageous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this. In Letters and Papers from Prison, composed while he was held captive by the Nazis, he wrote: “It
is the mark of a grown-up man, as compared with a callow youth, that he finds his center of gravity wherever he happens to be at the moment.”

  Each of us has our own way of coming to this moment. In Aldous Huxley's novel Island, brightly colored parrots are taught to continuously croak, “Attention. Here and Now. Attention. Here and Now,” to help islanders remember.

  Short of a talking parrot, you can try a simple technique of Thich Nhat Hanh's. As you breathe, say to yourself: Breathing in, I am aware of breathing in. Breathing out, I am aware of breathing out. You'll be amazed at how calm and patient you'll feel in seconds flat. From this calm place, we are more prepared to greet life as it unfolds, moment by moment.

  4

  THE PRACTICES OF PATIENCE

  The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be; all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.

  SOCRATES

  ULTIMATELY OUR TASK as patience seekers is to increase self-awareness. New brain research suggests that the time between an impulse and a response is half a second. Awareness increases that time by another half second. In other words, awareness doubles the time between impulse and action. That half second is the space in which patience is a viable option. Without that pause, we're operating from the emotional part of our brains that cares only that we get what we want right this minute, whether or not that's ultimately the most beneficial thing.

  To that end, the practices suggested here all help increase your awareness and thus, your options. At first, this is a very conscious process in which we notice our impulse to respond in our habitual hurried way and then opt for patience instead. The more we practice, however, the more patience becomes automatic, until we choose it without even being aware of the choice.

  TELL YOURSELF THE TRUTH ABOUT WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW

  Something happens when we don't resist, when we don't hate ourselves for what we are experiencing. Our hearts open . . .

  SHARON SALZBERG

  A number of years ago, I came across Robert Fritz's book The Path of Least Resistance. Fritz's work is about conscious change: how people and organizations change on purpose. His idea, based on the laws of physics, is very simple. We begin by telling ourselves the truth about what we want and where we are right now in relation to what we want, without judgment or criticism. So to begin to cultivate more patience, we first must ask how patient we already are.

  Fritz believes it's not useful to just say you want “more” patience, because what is more? How will you measure it? In order to know where you are and where you want to be, you need some way of quantifying. Since patience is not something you either have or don't have, but rather is a quality you exhibit more or less of at any given time, we can usefully measure it on a scale from -5 to +5, with -5 being the least patient you can be and +5 being the most.

  Think of your own life. What behaviors and feelings would be a -5 to you? What behaviors and feelings would a +5 be? A -5 for me would be throwing something or saying something really mean to someone else. It would feel like a raging red storm I had no control over. A +5 would be feeling totally calm in my body when Ana is dawdling and I must drop her at school and be in a meeting in twenty minutes but I take time to receive what she is saying.

  Now, given those two self-created measurements, where on average would you like to be and where do you spend most of your time? For me, I'd say I'd really like to be at 4.5 and I probably am at 2.

  When we tell ourselves the truth about where we are and where we want to be, we realize there is a gap between the two. That gap, says Fritz, is a good thing. He calls it creative tension, because it allows something new to be born by causing energy to move from current reality to your desired result. You don't even need to worry about exactly how it will happen, says Fritz. Tell yourself the truth about current reality (without berating yourself), keep your goal in front of you as you try some things, and notice what happens.

  Try it and see. Come up with your two numbers and write them down. Experiment with the practices in this section that you feel drawn to. Then check in again in a month (it takes time for this to work). What are your two numbers now?

  TUNE IN TO YOURSELF IN THE MORNING

  It's taken time and practice . . . to appreciate that how [we] start the day sets the pace for everything that comes next.

  TRACY D. SARRIUGARTE AND PEGGY ROWE WARD

  I have a friend who is a preschool teacher. One day she shared with me one of her great parenting secrets: “Spend twenty minutes first thing in the morning with your child with no agenda and the rest of the day will go much more smoothly. You'll have less trouble getting ready for school, less clinging when you drop your child off, and fewer conflicts at the end of the day.” I took her advice and it was remarkably effective. When I reported back in, she told me that I would be amazed at how many parents tell her they don't have twenty minutes to spend, and so they end up struggling with their kids all day and evening long, using up way more time than twenty minutes.

  To me, this is a story about how we can so easily be penny-wise and pound-foolish, with time as well as money. It's also about how setting the tone in the morning really does affect what happens for the rest of the day. Many people, particularly women, report to me that when they take even ten minutes for themselves when they first wake up, they have much more resilience the rest of the day. Kids, coworkers, spouses—all feel a little less overwhelming when they have taken just a few precious minutes to tune in to themselves first.

  That's because part of our lack of patience comes from the fact that we are being pulled in so many directions that we don't have time to pay attention to ourselves. No wonder we're short-tempered with everyone else—we're shortchanging ourselves!

  Right now, take a few moments to figure out when and where you can find the time to tune in to yourself in the morning. I tend to wake up before Don and Ana, and I relish that time lying in bed when there are no demands on me. But you can also take ten minutes in the parking lot before heading into the office, or at the school when you drop your child off.

  Those few minutes are your chance to prepare yourself for the day ahead. How are you feeling? What's on your mind? What is your soul longing for? Where might you need some help? What quality do you want to bring into your day—a sense of spaciousness, peace of mind, an open heart?

  Then for one minute in the evening, mentally review the day, noticing whether your morning tunein was effective. Were you more resilient and flexible? Did you cruise through the day in a generally positive way? What worked and didn't? Learning happens after an event when we stop and reflect, so give yourself that one minute in the evening to figure out whether the tune-in is useful or not.

  Try it for a week and then decide whether this is something you would like to do on a regular basis. Our reservoir of patience is refilled through attention to our own needs.

  WHEN AM I PATIENT? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

  You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience.

  STANISLAW J. LEC

  When we adopted Ana from China, she was one year old and seriously neglected. She couldn't even roll from front to back, weighed only fourteen pounds, and had second-degree burns on her buttocks from lying in urine. As soon as I laid my eyes on this beautiful child who had been allowed to languish for thirteen months, all my maternal instincts went into overdrive. I made a decision: this precious being simply needed love and attention to flourish.

  From that moment on, I had all the patience I needed. I refused to look at development charts in the pediatrician's office that described where she should be. I refused to compare her height and weight to children of the same age. When she began stuttering at age three, I refused to draw attention to the problem, allowing her the time to work it out on her own.

  Don and I held her, slept with her until she was four, and, aside from the time she was in preschool, spent virtually every waking h
our with her. At five and a half, she is a bright, beautiful, articulate, hula-hooping champion who is about to enter the advanced kindergarten at her school.

  Ana is proof that love can conquer all, but she is also a clue to where my patience easily resides. I have tremendous patience with people. I can get occasionally frustrated, annoyed, or even angry, but ultimately my patience kicks back in. I simply refuse to give up on a living being who has come into my sphere.

  You too have enormous patience for something and the more you study what fosters your patience, the more you will be able to engage it in any circumstance. Here's a way to begin. Take a few minutes to make a list of when you are naturally patient. Is it with people? With adults and children, or one more than the other? With animals? Or, like my daughter, in making things with your hands? Do you persist until you meet your goal, no matter what? Where and how does your patience exhibit itself?

  Now look at your list and study your pattern of success. Think about what makes patience possible for you during those times, when it's easy. You probably aren't consciously aware of it, but you are actually doing something to trigger your patience. It could be a feeling you have, a picture you see in your head, a phrase you tell yourself. You are doing something that allows you to hang in there.

  When Bob, a client, did this exercise, he discovered that he is very patient with breakdowns of all kinds in systems at work because he sees a picture of himself succeeding in the past and that gives him confidence in the current situation. With me, whenever I'm patient, it's because I've felt my deep desire to foster the growth of another living being. When I feel that feeling, my patience is virtually endless.