The PATH: Patience, Patience, and Patience
sent by J.W. Bertolotti | March 14, 2022
Welcome to The PATH — A weekly reflection with three timeless insights into daily life. This week’s reflection searches for ancient lessons on the topic of patience. Specifically, the wisdom of letting life unfold — patience (with yourself), patience (with others), patience (with life).
1. Patience (with yourself)
We’ve all had moments with a lack of patience or heard the cliche — “patience is a virtue.” And it’s been said that we often overestimate what we can accomplish in three months and drastically underestimate what we can achieve in three years.
The poet Ranier Maria Rilke suggested we become comfortable with uncertainty and have patience with life’s questions. He wrote in Letters to a Young Poet,
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers.
According to Rilke, we must have patience with ourselves as well. “To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree.” Life will come regardless. But only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and patient.
For the overly self-critical, patience with ourselves is a difficult task. The theologian St. Francis de Sales provided sage advice here,
Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You are a perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist.
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2. Patience (with others)
In Meditations, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, “At the start of the day, tell yourself: I shall meet people who are officious, ungrateful, abusive, selfish, etc.” At first glance, it appears to be a somewhat negative outlook on human nature.
But interestingly, the passage continues like this,
In every case, they’ve got like this because of their ignorance of good and bad. But I have seen goodness and badness for what they are, and I know what is good is what is morally right, and what is bad is what is morally wrong, and I’ve seen the true nature of the wrongdoer himself and know that he’s related to me…
There is no debating the challenges of dealing with others; this was true two thousand years ago for Marcus Aurelius and is still true today. The option to respond with patience is always available.
Marcus Aurelius concluded the passage this way,
None of them can harm me, anyway, because none of them can infect me with immortality, nor can I become angry with someone who’s related to me, or hate him, because we were born to work together, like feet or hands or eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against each other is therefore unnatural — and anger and rejection count as working against.
Similarly, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche advised, “In the end, we are always rewarded for our goodwill, patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange.”
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3. Patience (with life)
The classic Chinese text, the Tao Te Ching (traditionally attributed to Lao Tzu), highlights the wisdom of patience. Lao Tzu wrote, “Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle.”
The scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin observed,
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that it may take a very long time.
The wisdom of patience enables us to allow life to unfold. As the philosopher, Aristotle put it, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
As we navigate daily life, we would be wise to remember the words of the philosopher Heraclitus, “Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day.” Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character and anything else worthwhile.”
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful. If so, please consider sharing it with others.
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Image credit: The Self-Portrait by James Ensor (1899)
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