Patience: Why you should give space to practice it
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not a patient person. My belief is time is the enemy of getting things done. And the lesson “you don’t make the same mistake twice” was instilled in me at a very early age. Tasks as simple as leaving the toothpaste out on the bathroom counter or maximizing my trips to the gas station are perfectly calculated to optimize efficiency. And don’t get me started on the hygiene of the kitchen, particularly dishes in the kitchen sink. Hmmm…now that I’m here in my weekly confessional, perhaps I have more issues than just being impatient!
“I’m gonna go see Dr. Finklestein and I’m gonna tell him we have a whole new bag of issues. We can forget about mom for a while.”
Vince Vaughn as Jeremy Gray in Wedding Chrashers
But let’s get back on topic. Today’s turbulent times and in the never-ending information age with nonstop distractions push us to desire headspace. We’re searching to escape the time pressures and the daily stresses we all go through. Why can’t we go back to elementary school when the summer days felt never ending and the biggest concern we had in a given day was how long to stay at the pool. I know some aren’t as fortunate as others, but I’m alluding to the sense of freedom and carelessness we have as children. Our daily stresses hadn’t reached us yet and I long for that feeling. However, I am afraid our friends at Apple, Samsung, and Google have all but stripped us of that potential with the rise of smartphone addiction cases. Here’s where I link Apple, Google, and Samsung‘s stock prices.
Pick up your phone and click an app: dopamine hit. Phone vibrates, “who’s texting me?”: dopamine hit. Wonder if anyone has posted an interesting story on Instagram?: dopamine hit. Let me check my email: dopamine hit. Why aren’t we noticing that all these dopamine hits are wiring us to be impatient? Whatever happened to my mom’s favorite phrase of “delayed gratification”? Today, we get whatever we want, whenever we want, with the press of a button. No wonder we’re impatient!
Enter the idea of “mindfulness”. Mindfulness has gained immense popularity in the West over the past couple of decades and has expanded from merely a religious concept. With the rise in the cell phone and our world being more connected than ever, mindfulness aims to help us be aware and present in each and every moment. We’re now seeing apps like Calm and Headspace becoming more popular in the App Store as people are exploring remedies for anxiousness and daily pressure through meditation.
Personally, mindfulness has become the backbone of my “patience practice”. What started as a selfish task of trying to clear my own head and alleviate my own anxiousness, slowly expanded into residual effects like patience and kindness towards others. I noticed at work, my temper wasn’t as short and at home, my temper wasn’t as short! I now look at mindfulness as foundational to my daily patience practice and my practice has expanded for others more than it is for myself.
Though mindfulness has been the critical pillar for developing more patience, the secondary pillar has been daily intention. We must become intentional in wanting to develop a daily patience practice. Patience doesn’t just magically appear out of thin air one day. It’s a developed trait we must work on over days, years, and decades.
So, wake up each morning with the intention to be just a little bit more patient and start to see your own patience develop. And do me a favor, count the small wins. Put a tally on the board when you take a breath vs. snap on a coworker. Add one to the win column when you walk into the other room when seeing dishes stacked in the kitchen sink. Pretty soon, you’ll see these small wins start to add up and slowly feel yourself becoming more patient.