I invite you to think of patience not as a tool, but as a condition. When we use patience purely as a tool, when we wait for something, then our patience will last only as long as we wait. If something takes longer than we think it should, we’ll reach the limit of our patience.
But patience as a condition is not about expectation or realization of an eventual goal. As long as patience remains a mere tool for us, we waste our time with others and with our surroundings waiting and expecting, thinking about that ‘something in return’ and we are only patient because we think it will help enhance our experience in the future. What we are doing though is not being patient, but really just limiting our impatience. As a tool, patience will only last as long as our ego allows it too because as a tool, it is subject to ego. It is transactional. The longer I wait, the better I am, hence the more I deserve. Don’t believe me? Well have you ever gotten angry waiting for something that never happened? That my friend is ego.
Instead, realize that patience is a spiritual condition – it is a way to experience the world. Patience is a perpetual manner of being. It is remaining quiet and open to experiences as they come to you… or not. It is not trying to influence events or people to meet your ends through displaying the act of patience, it is simply a way of ‘being’ – reacting to the world when and if it presents itself to you.
If Mistress tells you to wait and leaves the room, accept the simple fact she may never return and your life has now changed. If you accept patience as a manner of being then while you ‘wait’, you will turn your attention to other things. The comfortable warmth of the sunlight coming through the window. The softness of the rug beneath you. The emptiness her leaving causes within you and why. Instead of making waiting a chore that you may or may not be able to achieve, accept that the here and now ‘is what it is’, as she made it for you… without her, and as might always be.
Being patient as a spiritual condition lets you live in the here and now instead of wasting yourself – your time and energy – on projecting a possible future that may never come. Your patience is freed from the constraint of ego, because instead you realize you don’t control things. Your only real choice is how you choose to react to things right now, moment by moment.
Instead of saying, “Be patient”, perhaps we should say, “Be Patience.”
Share this content:
