Patience

by Gregory Allen Butler

Patience is the attribute of the mind that enables one to have clarity, awareness, poise, relaxation, happiness, and purpose. Impatience, on the other hand, leads to frustration, reactivity, stress, fear, panic and confusion. Thus, it is of extreme importance if we seek success in our lives.

Like most people, I experience both of these states--patience and impatience. I realize I have not given patience and impatience enough conscious thought. When I do use consciousness, I have more of a choice in whether to be patient or not.

Like all aspects of life that are not running smoothly and holistically, bringing attention into the dysfunction is the key to bringing it to an end.

In my quest to bring more consciousness into the realm of patience, the first thing I want to do is examine the parts of my life where I do have patience--to see why I am able to be patient in those situations. That might hold the key to altering the parts of my life when I am impatient.

It seems that I am patient with anything that is connected to being a better person. I am patient with writing, with cooking, with creating this website, with creative projects, with taking long trips, with helping people, with improving our house. I have patience for long walks, waiting for the sunset, long movies, 1000 page books, and learning a new skill.

I'm not patient when it comes to tedious paper work, politicians, ignorant people, illogic, cruelty, pollution, littering, and finding lost objects.

I guess it boils down to feeling patient when I am feeling productive and seeing a positive outcome; and feeling impatient when I see that what I am involved with could be a waste of time.

When I encounter a narrow-minded person who wants to tell me why his spiritual path is the only way I have three choices: 1. Try to have an intelligent conversation; 2. Get in an argument; or 3. Walk away.

When I look at this scenario in a detached hypothetical way, I can see that the only real option is to walk away. It truly is a time waster that will probably disturb my poise if I don't walk away.

When I am walking through my yard and I see somebody has thrown a beer bottle into it, I become annoyed. I lose my patience. What can I do about it?

The obvious choices are, 1. Pick up the bottle and forget about it. 2. Set up a surveillance camera and find out who the litterer is and go dump the garbage in their yard. 3. Be grateful more people don't litter. 4. Move to a town where they have a $10,000 fine for littering.

By giving this conscious attention, I see that being grateful that more people don't litter is the most positive choice.

In the past illogic exasperated me. For example, in a sales job a supervisor once took me to task because I spent more time per customer than anyone else on the team. When I told her that that was because I had more sales than anyone else on the team and that it takes time to close a sale, she still persisted in her criticism. Fortunately for me, she got promoted beyond her level of competence.

But what would I have done if she hadn't been promoted? My obvious choices were to 1. Quit. 2. Hurry my sales presentations and forget about sales. 3. Request a new supervisor. 4. File a grievance with the union. 5. Be grateful that I have the ability to sell and know that I could always get a job somewhere else. 6. Tell her she is a moron and get myself fired.

Options are always important when it comes to being patient. Years later, in a similar situation, I did request a new supervisor and it worked out well. It feels better to me to be proactive than a victim of fate.

When I read in the newspaper about harmful policies being put into place by short-sighted politicians, I tend to lose my patience. This was especially so when I was an editor of a union newsletter and I had to focus on politics. Now I don't focus on it. I have come to realize that what you resist persists. I believe that the most productive thing I can do is to help people live more conscious lives and put positive thoughts and love out into the world.

If the world is going to be saved it is not going to be by a politician. It's going to be saved by humanity as a whole being more compassionate and aware. As Gandhi said, be the change you want to bring about.

Another challenge I have is harnassing enough patience when I need to find something that I have lost. Usually, I give up. I guess that comes from the fact that up until that point, all the evidence pointed to the fact that the missing object was gone. So why waste time looking for it?

Ten minutes is about the maximum amount of time I give myself to find something missing. After that I announce to my wife Maggie that it is gone. Then she usually finds it in about 10 seconds.

The solution to this type of impatience is being more conscious of what I am doing. If I set a book down in the living room instead of in my office, I need to make a mental note of it or else put it back where it belongs.

If I lose a sock, for example, my choices are 1.) buy a new pair of socks; 2.) go around wearing one sock; 3.) Don't go anywhere until I find it; 4.) move to India and just wear sandals.

There is one more choice. In this type of situation, I don't have to be patient. I just have to be accepting. I can accept that I lost a sock and go buy more if I need more.

Acceptance goes a long way in the prevention of impatience and frustration. If I am willing to go to a new contingency plan, I can keep my poise and the subject of impatience doesn't even need to be an issue. If we can up level our impatience to constructive action, then maybe the situation that brought about the impatience was a fortuitous event. And that too is a matter of acceptance.