patience
To be patient is simply to be completely open to each moment, accepting it in its fullness, knowing that, like the butterfly, things can only unfold in their own time.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Of course patience is the last of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seven attitudes of mindfulness that I choose to reflect on. It is one of the most challenging.
Each of the attitudes is essentially intertwined with the others. Beginner’s mind is non-striving. Acceptance is letting go of hopes and expectations. Trust is not judging what is presented in each moment.
Patience lives inside each of these. While it’s most often used in the context of delays and waiting, the original meaning of the word has nothing to do with time:
patience (n.) c. 1200, "quality of being willing to bear adversities, calm endurance of misfortune, suffering, etc.,"
Thus the use of “patient” to describe a person suffering from illness makes much more sense. Today’s common usage, then, comes from an equation of waiting with suffering.
It’s appropriate that I reflect on patience during this time of year, known in the Christian calendar as advent (also from Latin, meaning “coming to” or “arriving”): the period before the Messiah’s arrival on Earth, marked by the Christmas holiday. When I played piano and organ in Christian churches, I always enjoyed the music for this season: so much reflection and longing, so much anticipation before the explosion of rejoicing on Christmas day. In 2017, when I still lived in that world, I wrote about this time:
The priest at one of this morning's services described it thus: waiting is often a source of frustration for us — waiting in line, waiting for service at a restaurant, waiting for a package to arrive — because it is a situation in which we have no control. Advent is not like that. It is like waiting for a beloved house guest: we clean, cook, prepare, present. It is an activity, rather than a period of passivity.
No doubt it is easy to wait with anticipation and excitement when the joy of Christmas is coming soon, but what of everyday life? What of the patience required when embarking on the journey of mindfulness?
Our desire for things to arrive more quickly didn’t begin with Amazon two-day delivery. Instant gratification is a source of much impatience, but not nearly the only one. Impatience says, “What’s happening now is not right. It’s not the way I want things to be. My version of reality is much better than this one.” Impatience is arrogance, in a way. We look at what’s before us with the certainty that it’s wrong.
Adhering to the traditional usage, we might think of patience simply as the tolerance of discomfort. “Suffering,” that big word, need not be a big experience. Waiting in a long line beyond our control, we create our own suffering (discomfort) by saying, “This should not be happening right now” or, perhaps even more sinister in its egotism, “Why is this happening to me right now?” Facing the discomfort (suffering) of sitting in meditation, confronting mental challenges, or simply starting something new, we ask ourselves, “Why aren’t I good at this yet?” or “When will this be easy and enjoyable?”
Judgments like these disregard the value of the present moment. Even when what’s happening is not what we might expect or desire, we must ask ourselves, what can I learn in this instant? What might I find valuable in this experience?
And even if those questions cannot be answered satisfactorily (there is a danger in constantly justifying with optimism rather than simply observing without judgment), the reality is that this moment is all there is. We may never make it to the front of the line. The delivery we anticipate may never arrive. Life is not composed of good times and waiting-for-good times. Each moment is happening as it is, never to be experienced again.
This is one in a series of reflections on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seven attitudes of mindfulness: non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go (published in Full Catastrophe Living, Bantam/Random House 1990, 2013). Quotations are excerpted from Full Catastrophe Living.
