What could be learned about patience when looking at how past generations in your family lived?
Look at what sort of work they did and what they had to deal with on a regular basis. Life in general was slower, and people had not choice other than to accept that reality. 50, 100, 200 years ago, who had the access to instant gratification and information and results like we currently have?
Travel was slower, not necessarily because of the speed of the transportation method but because of the lack of development and engineering that there is now. Having everything available to you ironically creates a more rushed lifestyle than what people lived all those generations ago when they had less available to them and it took more time and effort. Just think back to the stories you’ve heard, where every day someone years ago met in person with so and so other person, then met another and maybe more after that, continuing on all through the day.
Who has time for that in today’s society?
It can’t be said that nobody had interest in progress; it was more likely that they had different priorities. They knew that what was immediately around them was most important, not what was beyond their reach.
Patience is an often misunderstood and universally ignored ability. It’s no wonder why, when the opposite of patience is so much more enticing. Impatience brings fast results. Patience doesn’t. Who wants to wait, when there’s a way to not have to?
At least, that’s how it would appear at first glance.
There’s rarely anything that is so definite; Patience and impatience are inter-connected. There are moments when impatience doesn’t make anything happen faster, although patience does, and the opposite is also true.
Who hasn’t worked on a task, job or hobby where the visible progress being made is very slow, to the point of feeling like every day the same thing appears before us, although a few weeks later there are noticeable results and you finally realize all the work was worth it?
Let’s look at it in more detail:
When you’re impatient, pressure put on other people or the situation or even on yourself. In exchange for this, there is a lack of attention to details and many details are overlooked, even though they would likely be of benefit to you. There are three main areas where these details appear: people, objects and surroundings.
– People can give you beneficial information in how they act and interact with others and their surroundings.
– Objects can give you information by studying what they look like and what is happening around it and with that object itself.
-Surroundings often react with people and objects and the opposite is also true.
What if instead of being impatient, time is taken to look around and notice all the details, then determine whether it’s really beneficial to be impatient?
Wouldn’t it be a better solution?
Sure, there would be times where it would not work to your benefit; However, from personal experience, positive results end up being more numerous than negative results.
Reflecting on what my teenage years of life were like:
I’ve lived through many years where waiting for something to happen or to arrive felt amplified far beyond anything reasonable. As an example, waiting a month for a new magazine to arrive in the neighborhood convenience store actually felt more like a decade.
Looking back, it’s now clear there were several causes for this, emotional reaction being the most influential. In my case, this magazine was by far my favorite reading material, which I went through far too quickly. The pure excitement of what was to come in the next issue was so strong and uncontrolled. The worst part was that it spread into every other aspect of my life. It was impossible to wait for anything to happen, to the point where anything that had progress measured in weeks was a nightmare situation. It’s great to be impatient when it comes to expectations, although there has to be a counter-point where you ground yourself to not get carried away, where you can stop at the point that being impatient becomes more of a hindrance than a help.
At a certain point you have to enforce a limit for yourself where you accept the fact that something will take longer than you expected it to. Without that, you end up focusing all your energy and thought into the delays and it ends up creating negative emotions such as anger, frustration, regret. Another unpleasant side effect is that it ends up, like stress, affecting relationships and regular interactions you have with people.
Regardless of how much negativity it brought me, I was entirely powerless against going through the same process of becoming quickly impatient again and again. It was only after many years of trial and error did I find a way to look at patience as something positive. I learned through the process that patience can also bring good things and that there are far more benefits to waiting and looking at the bigger picture.
An ideal example from my personal experience, to showcase what a difference patience can make in the outcome of most situations:
Upon arriving at a store, there is a long line of people waiting, with next to zero signage or guidance from staff at the store of where people should go, what they should expect and when the item they are waiting for will become available. In most case I have limited time to deal with something unexpected like this. I have to get what I came for instead of having to come back again another day. People wait 15, 20 minutes without much change in the lineup. They start getting frustrated with the wait, and start getting impatient and agitated. While taking out their frustration on store employees will get some general response, it doesn’t change the reality. Rarely do people take notice of anything else going on in the store when it gets to that point; there could be something happening like a new line being opened to reduce the wait time for customers, or the product could be brought out without announcement, which happens fairly often, if there isn’t communication between all the employees in the store.
Overall, this is but one of many examples of how patience pays off in real life situations.
Impatience breeds strong negative emotions, which for the most part blind your judgment, making it more likely that you’ll miss out on important opportunities.
As mentioned in detail above, there are many unexplored benefits of patience.
I strongly believe that it is one of the hardest earned and most important abilities to have in life.
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