Wanted: Patience

Patience, that elusive and difficult virtue, is always in short supply. As I dealt recently with several friends in turmoil, I asked myself, can patience be taught?

How can I help a student of mine whose family, like him, acts impulsively, often with anger and criticism? When I hear myself saying, "Be patient," I realize how useless and absurd it is.

We are all impatient in our daily lives--with stupid politics, advertising, telephone solicitation, traffic problems--and sometimes with good reason. It takes heroic saintliness to rise above these irritations and smile with patient understanding.

Earlier in my career, I investigated the history of patience in philosophy and the arts, with special focus on the Stoic and Christian meanings this word accrued over the centuries. I was fascinated to learn how much had been written about patience as spiritual fortitude, and how this is found in Shakespeare, Milton, and other writers of the English Renaissance, which I taught. The result was my first boook, The Triumph of Patience.

Although I learned a great deal about the virtues of resistance and endurance as they were once understood, I was no better off dealing with my own impatience over trivial mistakes or dealing with others. I sometimes see patience as a result of fear, leading to anger: fear that we are not being heard, not being respected, not getting what we deserve, or simply running out of time as we sit stupidly in front of a non-functioning light or clerk or computer.

We seem hard-wired to be impatient and angry, like the protagonist in Russell Banks's fine novel Affliction, which I am reading. It is a study in male violence, among other things, and has good insights into postmodern masculinity. The full meaning of its title will become clear as I read further.

I want to say to this character, as to my impatient student, "Slow down. Breathe. Listen. To listen well is a great skill that means putting your own ego on hold for a while so you can give full attention to another. And when you speak, think of what you are going to say so that you don't blurt out something harmful to others or embarrassing to yourself or both."

Yet no one can undo the schooling in impatience that is acquired from one's upbringing and one's culture, which moves a ever-more increasing speed. So perhaps the best I can do is try to slow down myself, listen patiently, and try to be a model of what patience might be.

Obama seems to be a patient man, rarely unruffled, or so it seems. Yet as a leader, he recently advocated action on various social and economic issues that cannot wait: like civil rights, he said, we cannot afford to be patient in the midst of crises that we are responsible for solving.

But on the personal and family level, waiting patiently is often just what is needed when conflicts arise. If impatience is like anger, patience is like love: hence the Bible says, "Love is patient." This is not romantic love, of course, but love in the fullest sense, the love that leads us to see others as worthy of caring, respect, and selflessness. It is the love that endures all things.

We all need a daily dose of patience; its source is within each of us.

Never enough time--or patience

When my aged neighbor rings the doorbell, as she routinely does, late in the afternoon when I am napping or in the middle of a project, I know that she will not say much of anything when I answer the door. Growing weary of these interruptions, I began putting a discreet sign on the door: Do Not Disturb.

Since that has had no effect, I recently moved it so it hangs right over the doorbell, so that she could not help but see it. Yesterday, she rang anyway, ignoring all warnings, and I became angry when she offered, as always, no apology. In the past six months of these interruptions, I have been annoyed and whenever possible let my ever-patient wife handle the neighbor, who is more than "out of it," to put it mildly. She is also lonely and wants some human interaction. So I should be sympathetic and smile. Instead, I fume.

I try to put this minor challenge to my sanity in the context of patience, and I wonder if I am growing less and less patient; I also wonder how I can cultivate more patience. Is asking for more patience akin to asking for more time?

Since the two are related, I guess the answer is affirmative: I fear being robbed of my privacy and my time. Maybe I fear my own future dementia, when I will be the one going around the neighborhood ringing doorbells and never apologizing for disturbing the residents.

This neighbor, 85, has something in common with the boy I tutor: they both test my patience.
The boy, who is 15, has ADHD and seldom listens to me and wastes valuable time as a result of my need to repeat. He wants to rush through every assignment when I want him to slow down. He probably will never be a patient person.

All this leads to my wish for myself in this new year: to slow down, be patient, and repeat the words of St. Francis de Sales that are posted on my study wall: "Never be in a hurry. Do everything quietly and in a calm manner. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsover, even if your whole world seems upset."

This should be easy for me, a retired professor who is home most days writing or reading. But old A-type patterns persist, and my brain continues to burst with ideas and reminders of unfinished tasks. It's no wonder I have become a student of silence, a member of the Friends of Silence.

Or that I appreciate articles like that of Pico Iyer in the Sunday NYTimes, "The Joy of Quiet," in which he describes his need to escape the rush of daily life. For most of us, it's a life in which we keep finding more ways to connect and thus produce more stress. At the same time, he says, we keep finding new (or old) ways to disconnect. Often this involves a retreat to a place where the absence of TVs and internet connections and phones is a blessed relief.

He quotes Nicholas Carr: the average American spends eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen (TV or computer), and the number of text messages maddingly increases daily. So for more than 20 years, Iyer has gone to a Benedictine monastery several times a year, not to pray but to be: to lose himself in stillness, to enjoy nature unfettered by noise, to find something akin to happiness.

What he wants is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens. This is the idea of joy defined by the monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, a fine spiritual writer. As for me, instead of writing about all this, I should be practicing it daily. I don't need to travel to a monastery: I can create a monastic setting of contemplative life in my home, with my patient, literary wife and my ever-silent cat.

I vow to do more of this, become less busy, and maybe as a result less annoyed when my aged neighbor pushes my buttons.