Chester’s Tips for Success

We all need patience, after all it’s a virtue. I find it funny that there are so many virtues, like fortitude, justice, compassion, courage etc. Yet the only one that seems to have its own set phrase, is patience. Patience has a few definitions, but the one I like best is quiet, steady perseverance taken from www.dictionary.com. Quiet and steady perseverance is what allowed the tortoise to beat the hare. It is the quality that distinguishes adults from children, the wise from the ignorant. Of all my weaknesses, I believe that patience is my greatest. Lack of patience has led me to make rash decisions and say things that I would later regret. It has also resulted in a large pile of unread books littering the floor of my room. I believe my lack of patience stems from being raised in a culture that is characterized by instant gratification, a world that is instant and on demand.

Instant and On Demand

Given the instant and on demand world that we live in today, it isn’t surprising that the youth of today reject anything that requires delayed gratification or takes longer than their attention span can cope with. Just as discipline and good habits are key components of success, patience is a necessary virtue in the pursuit of any worthy goal. Even with discipline and good habits, without patience in today’s fast paced world, it’s very easy to give up soon after embarking on a goal due to restlessness and a desire to see positive results immediately. When I look back on my life and the decisions I’ve made to bring me to where I am today, I can see a very clear pattern of impatience. Patience is a virtue that I am working to develop; I believe firmly that it will serve me well in the future.

Discipline and Patience

So how to we develop patience? Well I think the development of patience requires discipline. We need to build up our patience meter over time. You can think of patience as the duration of time you can wait before giving up or losing your cool. Discipline allows us to build up our ability to endure and wait gradually. However on the flip side, discipline requires patience. If you are not patient, short term discipline will fail. For example, when you decide to change your diet in order to lose weight you expect an immediate and drastic change, but if the change doesn’t come fast enough, even after a few successful days of maintaining a disciplined diet you will probably give in to your old eating habits. Patience allows us to persevere over long periods of time. Given that discipline and patience are uniquely dependent on each other, it seems impossible to have one without the other. If you can’t have one without the other, how do you develop them both?

Peace and Patience

If we live in a world that is conditioned to expect instant gratification it isn’t surprising that ours is a culture that lacks the virtue of patience. But perhaps the impatient nature of our society points to an even deeper problem. I believe that a lack of patience is preceded by a fundamental lack of peace. Patience requires a state of mind that is quiet and steady, one that is at peace with itself and the world around it. A mind that is overly agitated or preoccupied with life cannot maintain the state of peaceful tranquility that patience requires. Though I’ve managed to get through rough periods of my life with my teeth clenched, I don’t think I would classify that as quiet, and steady perseverance. While I’ve never tasted true and lasting peace, I can imagine that it would be a truly wonderful state of being. Being in a constant state of peace would mean that your emotions would not flux between extreme lows and highs; it means that our well being and mental state would not be controlled by circumstance. When we have truly reached a state of peace in our lives, patience becomes an afterthought. Patience and perseverance are the fruits of a soul at peace.

Maintaining Peace

I hear taking deep breaths and drinking chamomile tea helps calm the body, but unfortunately that isn’t a sustainable in the long run. There are many books on meditation and spiritual awakening, but I haven’t tried any of them so I wouldn’t know. Being a follower of Jesus, I know that eternal peace and rest, a necessary condition for true patience, is to be found in God. The difficulty is in convincing the heart what the mind knows. I may know the secret to eternal peace, but I lack the ability to grasp hold of it because of the raging war that goes on within my heart, mind and soul between what I know to be true and all the distractions that the world seems to constantly throw at me. I believe that peace can be arrived at in a number of ways, but one thing I am sure of is that peace will remain out of reach if you allow yourself to be engaged in a world that functions on the basis of having things instant and on demand 24/7.

So in conclusion… I believe the search for patience is a fundamentally a search for peace, when you are at peace with yourself, your desires and what the world tells you to think or believe, patience will naturally follow. However, understanding this and living it out are two completely different challenges. But I have no doubt that it is a challenge worth undertaking.

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