by M J Ryan
All through the years I helped raise my two stepkids (who are now adults) and now with Ana, I've always issued a warning when my patience was being tested. That way, they know what's coming and can choose either to alter their behavior or endure my impatience. But it is their choice. They never experience my impatience or anger out of the blue. There's an early-warning system in place.
The system has worked remarkably well. The kids always took the warning to heart and modified their behavior, and I did not have to become the Wicked Witch of the West, suffering self-loathing and remorse later.
Issuing a storm warning provides great protection for the little ones entrusted to you. But it also is useful for us parents. Sometimes, just hearing ourselves say out loud that we are at the end of the rope gives us the strength to carry on. If not, at least we end up respecting ourselves more because we've paused to give the warning before letting loose. When we give notice before acting, we prove to ourselves that we are emotionally trustworthy. We're worthy of the love that our children offer us, as well as our own high regard.
Try issuing a storm warning next time you feel an impatience hurricane coming on and notice what it does for you and yours. If you have trouble knowing when the storm is about to hit, try the practice called Learn Your Early-Warning Signs first (see page 134). And have compassion for yourself when you blow it.
TAP INTO YOUR INNER WISDOM
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.
ALAN ALDA
When their kids graduated from college, Mark and Betty decided to downsize from their large suburban home and move to the city. They looked for months, until one day, Betty found her dream condo. She'd wanted to live on this particular block her whole adult life. They immediately placed a bid and went about selling the family homestead. But their house would not sell and they lost the new place.
“At first,” said Betty, “I was heartbroken and figured that I had to find another option. But then a strange thing happened. From somewhere inside of me came a message: Don't give up. This is where you are supposed to live. It was weird because the condo was now gone. But something inside me told me to hang on. For a year I passed by it on my way to work and the thought would come again: Keep waiting. Then, one day, out of the blue, it went on sale again. This time, we were able to sell our house. And now here we are.”
What Betty heard, I believe, was the voice of her intuition. We each have this deep, patient knowing that can help us when we are struggling. Is this a situation where we keep on pushing or is it better to give up? Should we do nothing or jump into action? Our internal wisdom can guide us.
It's great to hear the voice of our intuition as loudly as Betty did. But that doesn't usually happen. We have to get to our inner Wise One in other ways. In her book Stirring the Waters, Janell Moon offers a journal practice she calls “dialoguing” that can help.
Before you give it a try, please understand that journaling does not require writing in a blank book in neat rows. It doesn't even mean you have to write something down. You can do it as a series of ideas in balloons on a big piece of paper in no apparent order. You can read the following description and hold the questions in your head as you go for a walk, and notice what comes up for you. Depending on how your mind works, one method may be more effective than another. Give yourself permission to do what's right for you, not what you've been taught is the “right” way to journal.
First, write down or bring to mind the ten wisest people you know. Next, write down or bring to mind “a concern about your own patience,” writes Moon. She continues:
Maybe you're wondering if you should stay in a relationship. Or maybe you are in conflict with a friend and are trying to figure out the wisest, most loving response. All you need is something that you want counsel about patience on.
Now, consult your list of wise people and see which one could help you with this particular concern. Imagine a conversation with this teacher. The dialogue might go something like this: Me: “Why am I impatient?” Wise Person: “You may be afraid.” Me: “But afraid of what?” Wise Person: “Maybe it's that you'll get behind.” Me: “I don't feel competitive. Do you think that's it?” Wise Person: “Maybe it's more fear of survival and always being busy.” And so on, until you get the advice you need.
What I like about this technique is that it allows you to solve your problem your way. When we're stuck, we are cut off from our own resources to find a solution. Advice from friends, from this book and others, is all well and good. But you know yourself better than anyone else and, for the most part, other people give the advice that works for them, not necessarily for you. This method, by asking you to consider what someone you respect might say, helps you follow your heart to the answer that is just right for you.
KEEP YOUR BLOOD SUGAR LEVEL UP
Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth.
BORIS PASTERNAK
I was driving on a freeway in unfamiliar territory in Southern California with my then mate. “I'm hungry,” I declared. “I need to eat something.” He pulled off the freeway, searching. We seemed to be trapped in tract housing land. No restaurants in sight. Time passed; I got hungrier and hungrier. Still nothing. I started whining about not finding anything. Finally he spied a Safeway. “Let's try that,” he said calmly. I walked into the grocery store, aimlessly wandered the aisles. “There's nothing to eat,” I wailed, and stormed out.
All the while I was acting like a lunatic, there was a part of me, my still-reasonable self, observing my behavior and thinking to myself: What is going on? It felt as if I had been hijacked by an alien.
It was only months later that I was diagnosed with low blood sugar, which put the grocery store incident into perspective. If your blood sugar drops too low, you feel irritable, irrational—and impatient. I now recognize the symptoms in others. It's pretty overt: normally reasonable human being suddenly becomes short-tempered, rationality hanging by a thread if not gone altogether.
Parents of small children know this intuitively—kids get cranky when they are hungry. That's why the time just before dinner is often when tempers are the most frayed and patience is the most strained.
I say this to remind you that, while most of the practices of patience are emotional or spiritual, there may be biochemical reasons for your impatience. Maybe you just need to eat.
One way to tune in to this is to pay attention to when you lose your patience. Is it just before mealtimes? Do you seem to regain your equilibrium after eating? You may not feel hungry, even though your blood sugar is low, so it's better to look at the results (I feel more patient after I eat) than the symptoms (I'm hungry). Take note for a week and see if you can discern a pattern. If the answer is yes, for you or someone you love, do what those suffering from low blood sugar do: keep high-protein snacks close at hand. Cheese sticks, nuts, the whites of hard-boiled eggs, or plain nonfat yogurt are all good options.
Keeping up your blood sugar is an easy way to make sure you are giving yourself biochemical help in keeping your emotional equilibrium. It's not fancy, but it sure is effective.
REFRAME THE SITUATION
You will be pleased to know that the heat in Lucknow has been really hot! . . . It is good to burn with the heat of God outside since we don't burn with the heat of God in our hearts.
MOTHER TERESA, IN A LETTER FROM LUCKNOW
A shoe factory sent two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One scout sent back a telegram saying, “situation hopeless stop no one wears shoes.” The other wrote back triumphantly, “glorious business opportunity stop they have no shoes.”
This anecdote appears in The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. They use it to illustrate the point that we are all interpreting re
ality all the time, so we might as well tell ourselves stories of possibility.
My daughter reminded me of the usefulness of this recently in relation to patience. I was cooking dinner. Ana was, as usual, at the kitchen table making something out of paper and Scotch tape. She spent at least twenty minutes on this construction. Suddenly, as she went to set it upright, it collapsed in tatters. Did this five-year-old cry, moan, or complain? No, she simply looked at it and said calmly, “That was not a success.”
Out of the mouths of babes.
What Ana was doing was choosing to tell herself a story that allowed her to engage her patience and try again. She could have thought, This stupid paper is no good. Or, I'm such a klutz, that's why I can't do this. Or, I shouldn't even try to do things like this. Those thoughts and others like them would have led to frustration, annoyance, giving up.
But by declaring it “not a success,” with the implication that the next time she might meet with success, she was able to engage her creativity and motivation to seek a better solution. And that's what she did, running to my desk for cardboard that would make her construction more sturdy, and beginning again.
Ana did this without knowing what she was doing, but we adults can do it on purpose. Psychologists call it reframing—and it is one of the most powerful tools we have to overcome feelings of despair, inadequacy, or irritation, and engage our endurance and resourcefulness. It requires asking yourself one simple question: How else could I look at this that would increase the possibility of a good outcome and/or greater peace of mind?
When I first met my husband, he was thirtyseven and had never been in a relationship that lasted longer than nine months. He spent many years alone, but he never stopped patiently waiting for love. I once asked him how he did that and here's what he said: “Every time a relationship would end, I would say to myself, Well, I guess I still have something to learn before I can be in a long-term relationship.” That's reframing. Rather than blaming himself, the other person, or fate, he saw the situation as part of a learning process and therefore could keep his patience until true love arrived.
How can you reframe the patience testers in your life? The next time your blood begins to boil, ask yourself how else you could look at the situation. For instance, I have a friend who proclaims that he relishes the chance to be in traffic because it gives him uninterrupted time to think that he doesn't otherwise get. What you're looking for is an interpretation that offers possibility instead of panic, hope instead of hysteria. Your payoff will be a huge jump in your ability to engage resourcefully with life when it doesn't appear to be going your way.
FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO
A great preservative against angry and mutinous thoughts, and all impatience and quarreling, is to have some great business and interest in your mind, which, like a sponge shall suck up your attention and keep you from brooding over what displeases you.
JOSEPH RICKABY
Ana wanted me to help her do something or other. I was busy making dinner. “Just a minute,” I said. “A minute,” she moaned, “a minute is such a long time.” “Well,” I replied, sounding just like my mother, “think about something else and the time will go faster.”
Remember the old adage “A watched pot will never boil”? It's true, whether you are a five-yearold waiting a minute, or a forty-year-old waiting some unknown amount of time. The more we focus on the fact that we are waiting, the slower the time will go. That's why, often, the best patience practice we can employ is to do or think of something else. Preferably, as Joseph Rickaby points out in the above quote, something that is interesting to us.
Doing something else is more than just a distraction device, although it definitely functions that way. When we're in a situation that requires patience (and therefore is out of our control), and we put our attention toward something else, we remind ourselves that not all of our life is out of control. Somewhere we still can take charge; we're not completely at the whim of someone or something else.
When I worked with clients during a time when I was waiting on pins and needles for a buyer for my business, it helped me to no end. The more I was effective with them, the more I reminded myself that no matter what happened to my business, I could take care of myself and my family. When Ana distracted herself while waiting for me to come help her by pulling out some crayons and paper, she was proving to herself that she was not completely reliant on me for her happiness. She could entertain herself.
Take a moment right now to think about a situation that is requiring your patience. What could you do right now to gain a measure of control or pleasure in another arena of your life? Waiting for potentially scary test results or to get a call back about a date? Instead of brooding, can you think of something fun or interesting to do in the meantime? How about bringing a magazine when you have to stand in line at the DMV or mentally plan dinner in traffic?
To have patience doesn't mean to dwell endlessly on that which confounds us. It is perfectly all right to put our mind toward something else. Indeed, one anonymous pundit is convinced that patience itself is nothing more than “the art of finding something else to do.”
PRACTICE WITH AGING PARENTS AND OTHER ELDERS
To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
My friend Michelle is turning sixty this year. Her mother, ever more frail, is ninety-seven. For the past twenty-five years, Michelle has increasingly cared for her mother, visiting for weeks at a time, putting her life on hold for her mother's health crises, suspending travel and work, eventually moving across the country to be close. In all those years, her mother has never thanked her for the sacrifices Michelle has made. But Michelle never wavers from her commitment to help her mother have a dignified end of life.
Michelle is no saint. Often she loses her patience, particularly with her mother's inability to comprehend that she's old and can't, for instance, just flip her mattress by herself (which resulted in six months in bed with a strained back). Michelle gets frustrated, annoyed, even angry. But then she forgives her mother and herself and continues on.
In many ways, dealing with aging parents requires the kind of patience that raising children calls for: caring for the person's basic needs because they can't, having steadfast vigilance so they don't injure themselves, constantly being at someone's beck and call, repeating the same information over and over because they can't retain it.
The difference between youth and old age, however, is that as a caretaker of a young person, you can see progress; you're putting in all this effort so that one day your young fledgling can soar on his or her own. With the elderly, we must find other motivations: perhaps because they cared for us or because we want to make the end of their life as pleasant as possible. Each of us has to find our own reasons.
In her diary, An Interrupted Life, Etty Hillesum writes of her frustrations in dealing with her parents and what's required to do it well. “What's needed here is not a small act of love. It is something more fundamental and important and difficult. To love your parents deep inside. To forgive them for all the trouble they have given you by their very existence: by tying you down, by adding the burden of their own complicated lives to your own.”
At any given moment, however, when our patience is being tried, such lofty sentiments may not prove useful. What is most helpful at those times is to look at why our patience is thin.
Here's how Etty came to understand this: “It really has nothing to do with my father. That is, not with his person, his most loveable, pathetic, dear person, but with something in myself.”
When Michelle looked at her situation this way, here's what she discovered: “When I'm with my mother, I see that old age brings vulnerability, and that I will be like that one day. What if I need the kind of help she had to have? What if I suffer so much I couldn't be pleasant? I lose my patience with her because I want her to be the courageous mother of
my youth so I don't have to feel afraid of getting old myself.
“That realization helped a lot. So did being compassionate for my own vulnerability, my fear of aging. Every time I'm with her, I say to myself, Yes, you are afraid, yes you are vulnerable. And the more I do that for myself, the more patience I have with her.”
You can do it too. Ask yourself, What am I afraid of? the next time you find yourself short-tempered with an elder. The more you attend to your fears, the more patience you summon when you need it.
RESPOND FROM YOUR HEART
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong—because someday you will have been all of these.
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER
In One Day My Soul Just Opened Up, empowerment specialist Iyanla Vanzant writes about a powerful experience with patience: “I was rushing around the house trying to get somewhere I should have been, looking for pantyhose while putting on eyeliner, ironing my blouse while brushing my teeth. It's amazing the number of things you can do when you are late.”
The phone rang. It was her son, calling from prison. He'd bitten another inmate in a fight over a comic book and was calling for help. Her first reaction was, “This telephone call was interfering with my plans!” Her son rambled on, frustrated. She could think only of how very, very late to her luncheon she was going to be. Finally he said plaintively, “I'm really not ready to come home yet, am I?”
Suddenly she realized: This is my son. Calling from prison for my help. And I'm worrying about missing a luncheon?
“With all the love and patience I could muster at the moment, I responded, ‘Son of mine, you don't have to get an A on life's tests; you only have to pass. You took the time to call rather than stay in the middle of a brawl. If you ask me, I think you are doing just fine.’”