No one ever wrote, “Dear Santa, Forget the iPad. Bring me patience.”
Patience is the gift you need when you realize that Dr. Phil can’t solve your problems by the next commercial. It’s the gift you need when processing what happened to you turns out to be a slower process than you expected.
The first gift—humility—helps you to accept what has happened. Patience helps you tolerate the pain that comes from asking such questions as, “Why am I still crying after so many years?” or “Why is this shit still happening to me?” or “When will it stop hurting?”
If humility helps you accept events outside your control, patience makes it easier to endure not knowing how long your pain will continue.
“Grief is not a short-term experience. If you don’t accept grief as part of the cycle of life, you are going to be impatient,” says Dr. Joseph Schippa, a clinical psychologist who has worked with children after 9/11 and the Sandy Hook massacre. “You might not like that you started to cry in the middle of the department store, but instead of being angry with yourself, patience helps you accept that it happened, and it’s okay to feel that way.”
Even if you are not okay about breaking down in public, the second gift will help you to go easier on yourself if it happens again.
“It’s important to be patient with yourself and other people when they don’t know what you are going through,” Dr. Schippa says. “It also helps you to make peace with the event that devastated you.”
When you need more time than you thought you would need to make sense of what happened, patience is the gift that delivers.
Serenity Now!
Patience is not an all-purpose gift. It’s contextual. When you call 911, you don’t want a laid-back crew arriving an hour late. When survival is at stake, a little impatience can go a long way.
For more than forty years, Leslie McTyre has driven ambulances and supply trucks for the United Nations and other relief organizations in such hot spots as Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, and Kosovo. In life-and-death situations where time is of the essence, he believes that “You have to pretend to be impatient, to be in a hurry, but every syllable needs to be carefully thought out.” Appearing too calm just before, during, or right after a disaster can unsettle teammates.
“You need patience before and during disasters, but if you show yourself to be laid back, you get hell from those around you,” says McTyre, who sometimes has to act hurried, rushed, and impatient to convey a sense of urgency about his assignment. “There is no real rush to madness when you’ve already done the planning and calculations.”
Wouldn’t you rather have an iPad? I would.58 That’s because despite years of meditation, I remain an impatient soul who comes from a long line of easily frustrated, impatient people. Patience was neither practiced nor valued in my family, where parents and grandparents said, “Be patient” when they meant “No, you cannot have this or go there . . .” With so little exposure, I neither knew nor did I recognize the value of patience.
When I changed careers, leaving the addictive drama and rapid pace of TV newsrooms, I was surprised how challenging it was for me to learn to sit patiently and focus 100 percent of my attention to listening mindfully. During my first group meditation, not only could I not stop squirming, I could not focus at all. My mind replayed the Seinfeld episode where George’s father screams “Serenity Now!”
Laughing out loud would have gotten me thrown out of the zendo. On the other hand, maybe I needed to see how impatient I really was.
I’m still a work in progress and can’t help thinking that my writing this chapter on patience makes as much sense as Taylor Swift singing about relationships that end happily ever after.
As I finish each chapter, I pause for a quick check of my own emotional barometer. Of course, writing about what happened to someone who survived a shooting cannot be compared to having had to live through that. Nor can writing about it be compared to the front-line work done by first responders. Yet each narrative affects me deeply and often lasts longer than I expect. I search for the patience—still elusive—to take time to think about how the stories in each chapter are relevant for you.
The Two-Second Limit
Studies on patience show that people who have fast internet connections lose patience within two seconds when downloading a video that “takes too long.” If the video did not load within ten seconds, 40 percent of those participants gave up. In contrast, participants who had slower connection speeds reported higher levels of patience. This research is especially interesting because it studied the responses of millions of people.59
Researchers point to these and other studies as evidence that our dependence on technology raises the bar for expecting quick results. Does exposure to technology make us more impatient? A number of studies point in that direction.
An Aborigine Model of Patience
Perhaps we can learn a few things about patience from the bush mechanics of Australia, where their customary patience has become legendary. An anthropologist who has lived with these indigenous people explains:
“They are not in a hurry. If something breaks down, it breaks down for a reason that you might not understand.”
Instead of becoming impatient with being stranded in the outback as you or I might be inclined to become, aborigines will hunt for berries or lizards to eat while they hang out together until the problem is fixed.
As a passenger in trucks, Jeeps, and buses that have broken down in forgotten corners of the planet, I was given many opportunities to observe patience in action. My favorite breakdown was a crank-operated bus that stopped along the shoreline of Lake Titicaca. At 15,000 feet above sea level, Titicaca is the world’s highest navigable lake. Watching the driver, his assistant, and an assortment of local workers trying to crank the engine back to life reminded me of Charlie Chaplin movies. Watching them working so hard to start this retro engine filled me with humility and patience, although at the time I was distracted by a Bolivian woman who was exchanging pesos on the bus for black market rates.
A few months later, traveling in a motorized dugout canoe along a skinny, no-name river in the jungle, I got to face off with my impatience yet again when we ran out of fuel and had to stay in a rubber farmer’s bamboo hut until gasoline could be found. It took a few more hours to procure a live chicken and prepare it for dinner. For someone whose experience with chicken was limited to the Perdue section of her local supermarket, this, too, was a remarkable teaching on the gift of patience.
While those experiences made a strong impression, it was much easier for me to model patience in the wild. Put me in a deli line, and in less than five minutes, I can be a world-class fidgeter.
As George Harrison is reported to have said, “Anyone can meditate on a mountain with the Maharishi. The trick is to do it on Broadway.”
It Takes Time
It took Dr. Ronna Kabatznick nine years to metabolize the horror of her tsunami experience.
“Healing from being a tsunami psychologist took about nine years actually, until I really worked it out through writing my book,” she says. “The process would have moved faster with support but people were too threatened. But I’m a better and wiser person because of this.”
Frank Smyth agrees. The founder and executive director of the Global Journalist Security Community and a senior advisor for journalists’ security at the Committee to Protect Journalists, Smyth was reporting on the Gulf War in 1991 when, according to his website, he was imprisoned for eighteen days. It took him about seven years to recognize how severe the problem was, and then it took another seven years to address it in a forthright way with mind-body techniques, such as acupuncture and yoga.
“Some pain is going to take some time,” he says. “You have to give yourself patience to learn, to heal, and to grow. It’s very hard.”
When Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a tragic car accident on August 31, 1997, her son, Prince William, was fifteen years old and his brother, Harry, just twelve. On the twentieth anniversary of her death, they spoke publically about their loss for the first time.
In the HBO original documentary Diana Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, William compares her death to an earthquake that runs through a house.
“Your mind is completely split. It took me quite a while for it to actually sink in,” he says. “Losing someone close to you is utterly devastating. It spins you out. You don’t know what you’re doing, what’s going on.”
Although keeping busy for the first year helped William to cushion the shock, it took five to seven years before he could begin to rebuild his life.
Harry, who says he has cried only twice since his mother’s death, used to wonder how those who never knew her could show their emotions so openly. He says he himself was emotionally shut down.
“Being so small, it’s very difficult to understand, to communicate your feelings,” he says. “There’s still a lot of grief to be let out.”
During his decade of military service, he programmed himself not to think about her because it would bring up a lot of hurt and would not bring her back, which would have only saddened him more.
“I dug my head in the sand until it became white noise and then went through a long time sorting myself out.”
Patience in Action
While serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, US Marine Corps veteran Alan Clyne observed that in both countries, the enemy was patient.
“They are patient cultures,” he says, adding that “patience and calm are essential qualities of leadership.”
Clyne never considered himself patient.
“Like everyone else, I wanted instant results. If you weren’t living on the edge you were taking up space,” he says.
But a tour in Iraq gave him a new perspective and deeper appreciation for patience as an expression of mutual respect. Returning from a combat tour in Iraq in 2004, Clyne’s men gave him a plaque that said, “Thanks for bringing us all home.”
“We worked so hard, trained so hard, and we were patient with each other. Throughout that six-month period, we had guys get hurt but I didn’t lose anyone,” he says.
Clyne believes that modeling a patient, calm leadership style earned his men’s trust.
“We brought everyone home,” he says. “They had a lot of patience with me because they didn’t understand why I wanted to train them the way I did. That’s why that patience thing is mutually supportive.”
Recognizing patience is as important as practicing it.
“It does pay dividends to practice it and to realize how patient our environment is with us. We think the environment owes us something or it’s collapsing around us so we are walking on eggshells,” he says, adding that “more people need to learn from how indigenous people live with their environment.”
The Pace of Nature
Patience shows us it’s okay to stop measuring our days in digital units of time. Instead, it invites us to experience the natural cycles of sun and moon and the sweeping rhythm of the tides. In the days following a disaster, especially when there is no electricity, our bodies naturally adapt to the earth’s diurnal and nocturnal rhythms. Years later, when they look back, survivors often talk somewhat wistfully about what it was like to wake up with the sun and go to sleep soon after sunset when quiet fell upon the night.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.”
Living without electricity, water, and basic services is a crash course in patience. Every step gets thought out. How long will it take to walk to the distribution center to pick up water and bring it back? How long will it take to boil water on the small propane camping stove? Will you wash dishes tonight or wait until you have more dishes, so as not to waste water?
You begin to tell time by the light and shadow of the sun’s passing and by your body’s messages to eat, eliminate, and sleep. You start saying things like “It must be noon. My stomach is growling,” or “It’s around 4 pm. I always get sleepy around that time,” or “Let’s meet before the sun goes down.” Through many generations of the B.I. era (Before Internet), the seasons were our calendar, and people used common expressions, such as “After the salmon spawn,” “When the robins return,” and “Before it snows.”
Nature tells time by engaging all our senses, especially the sense of smell, which seems to store emotional memories on an olfactory palette: burning leaves in autumn; pine wreaths at the holidays; the first flowers of spring, and the smell of earth damp from a summer rain.
“A seed of prosperity is often hidden in the hulk of misfortune,” tweets Scott E. McLeod, a doctor of pharmacology, who writes the blog “Dr. Scott Health.” He reminds us that we cannot see the seeds’ potential until they emerge after a long winter. We cannot see under the psyche’s surface where our spiritual seeds incubate and germinate until they are ready to come up, into the light. They do it in their own time and their own way. We don’t yell at them for being slow. Nobody can force them to grow faster. The same holds true for healing.
Patience gives us the right to say, “It’s gonna take time. And that’s all right.”
The Element of Fire
In Chinese medicine, the element of fire corresponds to patience. That may seem counterintuitive because most of us think of fire as an element that ignites and inflames. Words like “fiery” and “passionate” connote quick surges of energy in contrast to the slowing down energy of patience.
Patrician McCarthy views patience through a different lens.
“Fire can teach patience to someone who learns by getting ‘burned,’ ” she says. “When someone learns that lesson, they become the most patient of people.”
Bringing fire into our environment can introduce us to patience (a quiet flame), and we can do that in several ways:
Wear something sparkly.
Fill your home with red flowering plants and red flowers, preferably with spiky petals.
Listen from your heart.
Talk to someone with whom you disagree.
Pay attention without judging his or her opinions. (This one is tough but it pays off.)
Light candles and place them around your home and outdoor space.
Sit quietly in front of a lit candle. Notice how the flame burns in its own time.
Five Minutes a Day to Patience
Choose one statement and practice writing it for five minutes a day. Do this for five days.
(Secret key to this practice: It usually takes less than a minute to feel impatient. This may seem counterintuitive but OMG! Impatience is a good sign. Sometimes, the fastest way to the second gift is by facing our own impatience.)
Life hurts now. I don’t know about tomorrow.
This too shall pass. I don’t know when.
It won’t be forever.
This pain is not what I want.
Let go and let God.
It is what it is. And that’s okay for now.
I don’t know how long this will last.
Tomorrow is a new day.