EKRJessica had one of those magical fathers—fun, adventurous, and a little mischievous. But he was also unpredictable, often disappearing for weeks, even months, at a time after he and Jessica’s mother divorced.
Fourteen years old when her parents split permanently, Jessica remained close to her father. Her mother was good about explaining the father’s absences. “That’s just the way he is,” she would say. “It’s not about you.”
Jessica always knew her father was going to disappear when he brought her a gift even though it wasn’t her birthday or Christmas. Just as she would start to open it, her father would stop her. “Patience, Jessica,” he would say, “this is a gift for later.” After many days or weeks, when she was really missing him, her mother would tell her to open the gift.
As Jessica became a woman, her love for her father grew. Even after she had finished school, become a marriage and family counselor, and had a husband and two children of her own, she and her seventy-something father were still as close as ever. Whenever he was planning to disappear, he would call to say that he was off on a trip and would see her when he got back.
One day he left and did not return. A few months passed and Jessica became very concerned; she felt something was different this time. When his friends told her that they had not heard from him in a long time either, she filed a missing persons report.
Four years later the call came. Her father had been found living in a nursing home in Las Vegas. Not until he had been admitted to a hospital for treatment of an acute infection had his name been noticed on a missing persons list. Oddly enough, the nursing home told Jessica that her father had repeatedly stated he had no family. Jessica was puzzled. But when she arrived in Las Vegas, she found out what was going on. Her father did not recognize her. He had Alzheimer’s disease.
Jessica was glad to have found her father but heartbroken to learn of his condition. After he recovered from the infection, she arranged for him to be transferred to a care facility close to her home. She secretly hoped he would improve and remember her. “I thought that this was just like him, always trying my patience. I felt like I had found him, but in a strange way, I hadn’t.
“I always thought that if I was just patient, sooner or later his memory would return. Day after day, week after week, I visited him. I was so angry; here he was and yet I didn’t know this person and he didn’t know me. The only thing that reminded me of my father was the patience it took to care for him. I tried to remember that the father I knew was in there, somewhere. As a counselor, I was always fixing other people’s problems. My own problem, I couldn’t fix. The only thing I could do was be patient.”
Her father’s physical condition slowly deteriorated. He came down with pneumonia and eventually died.
Over a year later, while preparing for a garage sale, Jessica came across her old answering machine. Her voice cracked as she said, “I thought I’d test it before putting it up for sale, so I plugged it in and pushed play. I couldn’t believe what I heard. It was my father’s last message. I had heard it when he left, but not since then. He said, ‘Jessica, honey, just wanted to let you know I am leaving, I hope you always remember while I am gone, I think of you every day, even if we don’t get to talk to each other. I know you worry about me, but I want you to know I am fine where I am. I love you dearly and look forward to seeing you again.’ ”
She wiped tears from her eyes. “That was my father—always teaching me patience. It was just like him to leave me one more gift, to be opened later.”
Many situations and diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, teach us big lessons in patience and understanding. Sometimes they are more for family and friends than for the ill.
EKRPatience is one of our hardest lessons, perhaps the most frustrating one to learn. I’ve never been a patient person. I’ve always been extremely busy, always on the move, traveling thousands of miles every year, seeing patients, giving lectures, writing books, raising my children.
Because of my illness, I can only get around in a wheelchair with someone’s help and have been challenged with learning the lesson of patience. I hate that it’s a lesson, yet I know that when we are sick, we must learn patience.
When I feel well enough, I go out with a friend. But I want to move around, to get around faster than I can in a wheelchair. Sometimes, when we’re in a store and someone’s trying to get by, I feel that I’m in the way. And once, when I was out with a friend shopping for winter clothes, she left me there while she went looking in another aisle. I just had to be patient until she came back.
Now I often have to do one of the things I hate most—wait. When you’re sick or dependent, everywhere you turn there is a lesson in patience. So I suppose it will be everywhere until I learn it. I’m truly having to learn this lesson from the inside out.
One lesson of patience is that you don’t always get what you want. You may want something right now but may not get it for a while, if ever. You will, however, always get what you need, even if it does not fit into your mental picture.
In this modern world, people are not used to living with discomfort. We expect results and gratification, right now! We want answers faster than they can be delivered. There’s twenty-four-hour repair and round-the-clock shopping. If we’re hungry, there’s always food available, from microwave dinners to all-night grocery stores and restaurants. There are twenty-four-hour office-supply and hardware stores, and who knows how much the Internet will supercharge our impatience? After all, we don’t even have to go to a store to order a book, we don’t have to drive up and down the streets with a real estate agent to see the houses for sale: it’s all instantly available.
People no longer know how to wait, or even what waiting means. It’s nice to have what you want when you want it, but the ability to delay gratification is important. Studies have shown that when children were given the choice of having one cookie now or two in an hour, the children who were able to wait did much better later in life. Patience is clearly an important asset, yet so many people stand in front of their microwaves thinking “Hurry up!” or are upset it if takes more than an hour to get their film developed.
The problem goes beyond the discomfort of having to wait. So many of us don’t know how to live with things as they are, how to live in a situation just as it is. We feel we have to change it, make it better, we don’t think things will be okay if they’re left alone. We think there’s a difference between something not happening soon enough and its not playing out the way we think it should. Yet these two thoughts come from the same place in the mind, from the judgment that the situation is wrong the way it is. What does being impatient ever get us?
The key to patience is knowing that everything is going to be fine, developing the faith that there is a plan. It is easy to forget this, and therefore many people try to control situations that would work out as they were meant to in their own perfect time. Even at the end of life, some accept that death is coming while others become impatient and want to know when. They are reassured to hear that they will not die before they are ready.
This is true about death and it is true about life. You will not be given any life experience before you are ready, when you find the trust and develop the understanding that things are moving the way they’re supposed to and in their own time. Then you can relax.
Philosophically, patience is like a muscle that must regularly be used, it must be exercised and trusted. If we don’t practice using the muscle in little, everyday situations—such as letting the tea take a minute or two to heat in the microwave—we won’t have a strong muscle to support us through life’s bigger challenges. That’s why it’s so important to develop a deep faith that healing is always at work. Since the mind will always seek to change things, we need to reassure ourselves that things are happening exactly as they’re supposed to.
The mind wants to believe that changing our circumstances will bring us peace. The mind thinks we’ve got to do something. But the reality is that we can relax in the circumstances as they are now, knowing that deep patience will bring deep peace and healing.
Cancer survivor and talk show host Selma Shimmel, author of Cancer Talk, tells of her father, who says, “We think the alarm clock wakes us up every morning, but it is God who decides to wake us up.” We think that we must determine the proper wake-up time, set the alarm, check it twice. We forget there is a bigger picture. God decides if we will have another day of life to wake up to. That is the bigger picture we miss, the muscle we don’t use. Sure, set the alarm, but remember there is so much more at work than you realize.
EKRRenee was waiting for the results of a biopsy. At first, she was completely focused on the two days she had to wait to find out if she had cancer. “Why is it taking so long?” she demanded over and over. “Can’t they do a rush? What if it takes ten days? What if my doctor doesn’t call back after a few days?”
I answered, “Whether we like it or not, it takes two days. Rather than spending two days fighting what is, ask yourself if there may be some important work to do in those two days. You can learn a lot about life in two days like these.”
That’s not to say, however, that you must wait forever. If the results are not back on time, you can call and say, “It’s day three, what’s happening with my results?” Being patient does not mean that we have to be victims. Being patient does not mean being powerless, it doesn’t mean that we have to tolerate abuse or suffer through terrible circumstances. We can be patient and stand in our power at the same time.
The call came on time and everything was fine. “I learned about my power,” Renee said later. “I learned to be with the process, to be with my feelings, to hear what the messages were. I learned to trust the universe and myself. I saw how, in the past, I didn’t trust myself to find my power and use it if necessary. And I learned what to fix and what to accept. It was a great lesson.”
Renee was able to let the two days be and find a lot of strength in the waiting. She learned a lot about herself and her life when she was willing to be with the process and let it be. She also had to trust that if the results were not announced to her in two days, she had the power to call or go to her doctor.
It’s important that we all find our power; if you’re being victimized you should stand up and say, “This is not okay.” But when life is dictating the story line, we need to find a way to relax in the situation as it is.
Life is a series of experiences everyone goes through. There is a reason for every experience, even if we don’t see it; there is a point to it all. Everything that has happened has occurred so that we can get the lessons we need. But it is difficult for us to learn those lessons when we’re impatiently screaming, “I don’t like this! I want it to change!” Sometimes we just have the experience, rather than deny, complain about, or try to change it.
Every experience will move us toward greater good and healing. The wonderful news is we don’t have to do anything to get this right. We simply live life as it is happening.
A truck driver named Gary learned a lesson about patience. Always on the go, he had spent many years drinking to assuage his unhappiness. Now forty years old, he was threatened with the loss of his sight. “I had window blinds in my home. All of a sudden they began to look wavy, then I noticed spots in my vision. At first, I thought I was just tired.”
The doctors implanted a new drug directly into his eye. It stopped the sight-robbing virus, but by that time this young man had already lost 65 percent of his vision. A secondary eye infection almost cost him his left eye completely. Two operations saved it, but his vision was severely damaged, and there was no hope of restoring it to normal.
Gary said, “I was told from the beginning there was nothing else to do about the eyesight. I knew I might spend a lifetime dealing with this.
“I needed a place to stay when I was in New York for treatment. By chance, the only place I could afford was a convent. It was full but they found one more room for me. While I was there, I prayed a lot for patience. I began to understand that I couldn’t change what was happening. I had done everything, I had tried everything. There was nothing else I could do for my sight.
“In life we often lose things; this was my thing to lose. I have seen so many people dwell in the sad parts of their life. I would mourn, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life mourning. Perhaps it was just the challenge I needed. Losing my vision slowed me down and made me refocus.
“I continued in a way I wouldn’t have before. Before I would have sat around doing nothing, being unhappy, drinking. But now I had to learn all kinds of new things to stay alive, including how to move through problems. No one was taking care of me, I had to do it myself. I had to find my own dreams and goals. It made me experience life more, enjoy it much more. I loved to play pool but thought I’d have to stop. But with some practice, I became good at it again. I have noticed that people in Los Angeles, where I live, are very impatient. They don’t have time, they want to rush, rush, rush. I used to be one of them but now I see that time is there to enjoy. And there is so much of it to enjoy.
“In some ways, I see more now than I did when I had all my sight. I look harder. I have to look harder now. I look for the humor and the good stuff in everything. A lot of people just can’t find the good things or the humor in life. I don’t think I see things that other people can’t see, they just don’t have the patience to look or notice.”
The first step in becoming more patient is giving up the need to fix or change things—it is having the awareness that some things are the way they are for a reason, even if we don’t think so or can’t see it.
If something is not changeable, try to see it as not broken. Try to find a little faith in the process and the unfolding of things. Despite our belief that things need our assistance, most of the amazing things that happen in the world occur without our help, interference, or assistance. We don’t have to tell the cells in our bodies to divide, we don’t have to tell a cut to heal. There is a power in the world. Trust that all things are moving toward the good, even when we don’t recognize it or see it. That is faith. Having patience is having faith.
In faith, you remember that no experience is wasted. Most people at the end of life would not even trade in their bad experiences, for they learned from everything that happened to them. Everything you go through, every windstorm in life, happens so that the perfect you can be born. If things are moving too fast or slow for you, remember that your timing hasn’t always been the greatest, and that there is a plan. You can afford to relax and let life unfold.
To afford means it is within our ability to give. This is a reminder that it is within our ability to relax and give in to the situation, knowing that we have the time, means, and courage to wait. And to remember that there may be nothing to wait for, that this may be the situation exactly as it’s supposed to be. It is no accident that the noun patient, meaning person undergoing medical treatment, and the adjective patient, meaning to tolerate affliction with calmness, are connected. They come from the Latin word pati, which means to endure.
We may think the story is about our health, work, or love life, and want to change it. Remember that it is not about those things, it is about you. It’s about the love, compassion, humor, and patience you bring to your life and its situations.
And remember that God and the universe are not ultimately just working on the situation: they’re working on you. If you’re wondering why the universe isn’t solely focused on getting you the great job offer, it’s because the universe isn’t always concerned with which job you have. The picture is much bigger than your job. Neither is the universe always concerned whether or not you’re married—it’s more concerned with your experience of love than who is or is not in your life. And rather than focusing solely on your health, the universe is more concerned with your experience of life, whatever the conditions may be. The universe is concerned with who you are, and it will bring into your life, in whatever the situations, in whatever time, what you need to become the person you’re supposed to be. They key lies in trusting—and having patience.