The Power of Patience: How This Old-Fashioned Virtue Can Improve Your Life

None of us wants to have to suffer through physical, emotional, or spiritual hardships. But when such trials do come—and they most likely will, for each life has its measure of sorrow—we have two choices: to rail endlessly against what is happening or to experience our feelings of sorrow, fear, and anger, then engage our patience and allow the chal

The beauty of the decision for patience is that it doesn’t matter how impatient we consider ourselves to be. We will always have another opportunity to choose! In whatever circumstance we find ourselves right now, we are free to choose peaceableness. Each and every day, moment by moment, the decision is yours.

All this stimulation and outward attention has one effect: to make everything a blur and to create a sense of mental restlessness that is the antithesis of patience. David Shenk writes about this in The End of Patience: “As we go to higher info altitudes, where the information moves faster . . . our eyes, ears, and cerebral cortexes have more to ke

Any time we proclaim something boring, what we really are saying is that we don’t have patience for it. Rather than looking at ourselves for the source of the problem—and therefore the solution—we look at whatever is provoking the feeling and label that the problem.

“When you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging.”

“Judging others will avail you nothing and injure you spiritually. Only if you inspire others to judge themselves will anything worthwhile have been accomplished.”

When you come into the present moment as it truly is, there are no problems, “only situations—to be dealt with now, or left alone and accepted as part of the ‘isness’ of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with.”

Patience also gives us calmness of spirit. With patience, our inner experience is more like a still pond than a raging river. Rather than being thrown into anger, panic, or fear by every circumstance life throws at us—a canceled plane, a missed deadline by a workmate, our spouse forgetting to do an errand—we are able to put it into some kind of per

The most important thing to know is that patience is something you do, not something you have or don’t have.

Through this acceptance of others as they are, and of life as it is showing up right now, we prove our true strength and beauty as human beings. It’s easy to be accepting when all is well. But when we are patient when things aren’t going the way we want, we truly shine as heroes.