Unlocking One Of The Keys To Patience
Patience is the one quality that we know we need. However, it is the one thing we do not know how to achieve. We were told by others, all our lives, to be patient. Yet we have no idea how to do that. Instead, we sit and suffer in silence, mistakenly believing that that is being patient. Yet the internal turmoil and discomfort continues.
This article will explore what leads to impatience and provides a simple and effective approach to being patient with life's most distressing circumstances.
What is Patience?
Patience, for our purpose herein, is simply the absence or removal of perceived urgency. The key word is perceived. Because you think something is urgent, does not necessarily mean that it is. You may think you need to get home to eat right now, and start freaking out when that gratification is delayed. You strongly believe that something has to be done right away but it’s not happening. You're stressing because something should arrive by now and it has not.
While there are situations that do require immediate attention, this does not mean that all situations are equally urgent. What creates this mis-perceived urgency?
What is Mis-Perceived Urgency?
Mis-perceived urgency is the mis-perception of an immediate need. You feel that you need something right now and you become impatient when it does not arrive now. What creates this mis-perception of an immediate need? It is an irrational assumption that because “I want it now” that means “I need it now.”
You feel hungry and therefore you want to eat now. But that does not mean that you need to eat now. Unless you have an underlying medical condition, you can go two days without eating and you will still be ok. Yes, you will be a little bit irritable and feel somewhat ill, but you are likely to still be alive and you would be able to function fairly normally.
You want your relationship to be repaired now. You want your significant other to begin contributing to the relationship right away. But they're not. You begin to get impatient. If your partner does not come around by tomorrow the relationship is still structurally intact. If they don't come around by next week you will still be together. Just because you want them to come around now, it does not mean that it is absolutely necessary, unless you yourself are itching to pull the plug on the relationship.
You just started playing the guitar two weeks ago. You hear other guitarist play and you feel like you yourself should be playing like Eddie Van Halen by now, but you're not. Things will be okay if you don't play like an expert within the next two weeks, or even within the next month. Unless there is some sold out concert that you're scheduled to play at, that you haven't told anyone about.
Assuming that a need is immediate just because your wanting of it is immediate, is irrational. There is no factual basis for it.
You want to sit an exam. You appreciate how important it is to be proficient in the material that you will be tested on. You finished your training only a week ago but you expect to be skillful in the course content and wonder why you’re not hitting near 100% on the practice exams. Your exam date is weeks away. You don’t have to be an expert right now.
You want to start a business. You’ve made the necessary investment of time, money and effort but it has not yet turned a profit. Startups take time to show a profit. If it doesn’t turn a profit next week or even next month, you will still be okay, despite your financial risk exposure (unless you are in serious financial trouble).
Once you are able to separate the immediate want from immediate need by asking yourself “Does this have to happen right now?”, you dissipate any sense of urgency. When you destroy urgency, you once again return to the patient state in which you were born.
So instead of thinking that you need to be patient, just look at what you think you want to have immediately, and recognize that it is okay to want it now, and that it is not implicitly an immediate need. Once you do that, your sense of urgency will go away. It's not that you have to become patient. You were already born that way. You just have to stop being impatient.