Patience Doesn't Make You A Pushover
We can all agree that patience is as essential to navigating this world as fluffy socks on cold days.
At the same time, we still think about patience as a gift to bestow on the unfortunately annoying but ultimately deserving people in our lives. We bless our in-laws and teenagers with our patience.
Never mind that the alternative would be the kind of ridiculous anger that would eventually give us a heart attack.
Being patient means saving our own lives, but we insist that we primarily spare other people pain instead. They are so lucky we are patient people!
Maybe, this is because patience has a bit of a PR problem.
In my mind, for example, "being patient" is somehow muddled up with "being a pushover" or "not speaking up for myself". When I was younger, patience was a great weapon to use against me. An appeal to my patience would shut me right up, even if I had a legitimate complaint.
Ironically, the more capacity for patience you display, the more it can turn into an expectation. Suddenly, it's not the person who stamped on your foot that receives an earful. Instead, it's you who has to listen to a well-meaning authority figure appeal to your patience.
"You should be more patient with them..."
Often, when someone tells us to "be patient", what they really mean is this:
"Dealing with the actual problem makes me uncomfortable, so I am just putting the onus on you because you are a nice person and don't make me so uncomfortable".
In my world, being patient meant "enduring more sh*t".
That's not patience. That's just suffering.
First of all, patience is not a pattern of non-reaction to bad things happening to you. The word for when you don't speak up for yourself when someone hurls abuse at you is "endure", not "being patient".
Patience is also not a feeling. The word for what you feel when you do not get angry at something annoying is "calm" or even "indifferent".
Instead, patience is a pattern of action. It falls into the same category as acting in anger, glee, or frustration.
Patience is the way you react, even when you are frustrated or angry.
What's more, patience is goal-oriented. You choose to be patient because you are interested in the outcome of not going ham on someone. Usually, not engaging patiently with what annoys us makes things worse, so there is a lot of self-interest here.
Patience is a choice, not an obligation. You do not owe anyone your patience. And yet, it is likely that if you engage with someone or something patiently, you can make headway towards your goal. Unless you genuinely love waiting, the long game requires patience.
Patience is about not throwing a fit when things bother you. But that doesn't mean you stay on the floor when shitty stuff comes at you. That's "giving up".
Patience is about getting back up and calmly trying again. It is about doing the things you need to do repeatedly, even though it's frustrating or tedious. You keep doing your thing until you get where you want to go without giving in to anger or frustration first.
Patience can mean being kind to someone even though it is hard. But it is kindness with an ulterior motive. You are patient because you are looking for a result.
Patience can be about forgiveness. It can be about "I know you're not there yet, so I won't yell at you or boot you out of my life".
But it does come with the expectation that the other person will eventually get better. A teacher who teaches without the expectation that his students will learn the material, in the end, is not teaching. They're playing Don Quixote.
Enduring the abuse hurled at you without the expectation or hope that the people throwing the mud will change one day is not patience. It's resignation.
There are a lot of things patience is not. It's hard to define. Especially when there is also "persistence" and "graciousness".
What I can say is that patience beats all the other "motivators" like anger or passion.
Anger is good for lighting a fire, and frustration has been the source of many inventions. It's incredible what kind of change we can make in the world if something bothers us enough. But being angry about something is not the same as doing something about it. Change does not come from anger. It comes from patient action despite or because of the anger.
Passion and fascination are also great ways to get on the road, but they can be fickle muses. They often don't stick around when the going gets tough, and they don't help with frustration. I have yet to feel passionately frustrated.
In the end, anger, frustration, or even fascination will all fizzle out faster than the Champagne on New Year's Eve.
Only patience, the ability to react to the tedium and indignance of the journey in a helpful way, will get us to the end of the road.
