It’s Time for Patience

Sometimes I sit in my local shopping mall, parking lot, or park bench, and become overwhelmed with the sensation that I am drowning in a sea of people. I watch and everywhere around me, people are buzzing by. There are cell phones and ipods. Laptops and PDA’s. Cars and plastic and concrete and noise. I wonder where we as a society gave up on patience. Has technology pierced us so deeply, that we now rely on it’s immediate portals  to an easier life? I spent some time amidst this endless cacophony of life to think of why it might actually be important to slow down and be patient for a moment or two.That’s right. I spent the most valuable currency or commodity any one of us has. Time. But more about time later. For now, on to patience.

First and foremost, patience, and perhaps more importantly the discipline to be patient brings you time to appreciate things as they are. Not as they were, or as you should hope them to be. As they exist in that moment, like they can in no other. This appreciation is much more important than it sounds. This is not a simple precursory glance at a part of your world. Appreciation comes from careful observation. Think of a warm moment when you saw something that made you smile, and appreciate life in a greater way. Perhaps it was a younger couple just walking by, dripping love from every pore. Maybe it was a child, working in the sort of innocent earnest that only children know. Whatever your moment, being able to appreciate individual pieces of the world around you is absolutely fundamental in gaining the next benefit of patience.

As you appreciate your observations and take note in the good alongside the bad in the world, you earn the time to understand things. Understanding covers more complex relationships than appreciation, and comes with time. Understanding parallels wisdom, and I mean to use it in an ancient sense; a sense of understanding that comes from deep within the mind. You may not understand how you came to your insight, but you know it all the same.

Once you understand a thing, you could say it is knowledge. Your knowledge is your key to power, as has been repeated for countless years. Your power in this respect comes again, in the form of time. Now, however, you have gained with your understanding, the time to change things. By appreciating the individual examples of life that define its characteristics at a given moment, you develop an understanding of how these characteristics interact. In ways, it is no different than a mechanic fixing a car. The mechanic identifies a problem, or condition. They will then observe (or appreciate) the characteristics known to be associated with that problem. This identifies the root of the problem and allows a fix to be made.

Now, why all this? What’s the point? The point is, as you rush through life, and are constantly having to work faster and stress more because of minor problems and surprises in life’s routine, take advantage of the downtime to identify the problem. If a certain part of your life is not how you want it, take the time to appreciate, understand, and control your piece of the world. If you don’t, somebody else will gladly do it for you.