Love is patient. – Paul the Apostle
Patience— (n) the capacity to endure delay and distress without becoming angry, or any of the euphemisms we commonly employ to pretend we aren’t angry, such as frustrated, irritated, and annoyed. “Standing in line at a register behind someone fumbling for eighteen cents in exact change, I was mildly exasperated.” This is not an example of patience.
Patience comes from the Latin word patientia, which means suffering. It was also the Roman term for somebody undergoing medical treatment. Anybody who’s been through childbirth or had a kidney stone understands the original meaning of patience. The suffering was literal. Today it’s the term we use when unhappy with our internet speed.
No one is born with patience. Babies are famously impatient. They want what they want, they want it now, and they’re willing to let you know. Time of day or convenience doesn’t enter into it. The subsequent difficulty of learning to accept delayed gratification, of going with the flow when there is no flow, and traffic is backed up for ten miles because someone was inconsiderate enough to have an accident, is simply a daily indication of how we’re still infants. But you have to start somewhere.
Patience is a virtue for people in recovery from anything that can be recovered from. A lack of it causes relapses, whatever relapse for you may mean. When explaining why they used drugs again, my addicted clients would routinely blame a case of the “fuck its,” as in “not willing to wait any longer.” It’s easy to get angry when genuinely feeling better is still miles down the road and you don’t have a car. That’s why the Twelve Steps focus on one day at a time; for normal humans, one day is hard enough.
A reason for our problem with patience is in how we gratify our wants. Basically, we need everything to be fun, and, when it’s not fun, we lose interest, ready to move on to something else. Sex can be like this. So can shopping.
In other words, to become more patient, find a way to turn annoyance into play. If you’re stuck in traffic because of that inconsiderate accident, and have others in the car, pull out a deck of cards and play a game of strip poker. I guarantee that the time will fly by. (This is a good reason to always keep a deck of cards in your glove box.) When you’re trapped behind the person scrounging for change, who also stoops down to pick up the penny he dropped, pretend you’re in a sit-com. If Larry David was the one counting out eighteen cents, you’d be laughing. Consider yourself blessed to have seen him in action.
This is why love is patient. Genuine love finds a way to turn anything into play and avoid the anger we feel when things stop being fun. If you’re having a good time, you’re not thinking about stress or inconvenience, or even the pain involved. Norman Cousins famously cured himself of a life-threatening illness by reading funny books and watching Marx Brothers movies. Michael J. Fox uses humor to cope with his Parkinsons. Playfulness increases health and helps us to endure difficult processes. Laughter, and the patience it enables, really is good medicine.
It’s also a way to know if genuine love is present. If a relationship is more work than play, that’s not a good sign, because eventually you’re going to want a vacation, maybe with somebody else.
The next time you’re becoming impatient, think of the “play” options available. If you are waiting for somebody who is chronically late, make a game of it, place bets on duration, offer each other prizes. You may be glad you waited.
1 Image of thinker by Annette from Pixabay
2 Image of boy by Rainer Maiores from Pixabay
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