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

“When pain strikes, we often ask the wrong questions, such as Why me? The right questions are, What can I learn from this? What can I do about it? What can I accomplish in spite of it?”

When we believe in a happy future, we can wait more calmly now. This takes faith—in ourselves, our partners, our God, the benevolence of the universe—because we have no guarantee one way or another. We must live as if it will turn out, without knowing precisely how it will end up. And that is not always easy, particularly when there’s a lot at stak

life will turn out exactly as we want it. Businesses and relationships fail; the stock market goes down as well as up. Ultimately our faith asks us to believe that even if it doesn’t turn out the way we wanted, it still is for the best—we

One reason for this is that a synonym for patience is self-possession. I love that word; it helps me remember that, with patience, we are in charge of our selves. We can choose how to respond to a given event, rather than being hijacked by our emotions.

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

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

Most of us alive today think waiting represents a flaw in some system, rather than a natural condition of life. But human beings have always had to wait—for good weather to plant crops, for plagues to end, for their loved ones to return from years at sea, never knowing if they were alive or not. The only difference now is what we wait on, not that

Or perhaps the other person represents an aspect of ourselves that we’ve disowned. In psychological terms, this phenomenon is called projection. We get impatient with others who represent aspects of ourselves that we have pushed away or are angry we 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.