Patience

What is patience?

Do you believe patience is rewarding at the end of the day?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mark Huckabee on February 5, 2011 at 3:18am

Let me explain my response above about NO to patience.

I'm older than most of you here (51) and I've done a LOT in my life. Some of those things required some patience to achieve but many were just fortuitous accidents. I don't regret AT ALL the life I've led so far but there is SO much more to do. The older I get the more I realize that ANY second you've wasted is a second you'll never get back. For example, take a look at this post by Adventurous Kate about tubing and bar hopping in Vang Vieng. This looks like an absolute blast, but I'm already too old to hang with this crowd. BUT there are still a million and one things I CAN do, so I'm DOING them.

Waiting around for something to happen is just wasting your life. I'm not saying though that you shouldn't prepare yourself for the future. One of my favorite quotes is "Chance favors the prepared mind". It means that you never know what is going to happen so make sure that you prepare yourself well. If you are using your time well to prepare for the future then that's great. If however you are using patience as an excuse for being lazy or being afraid of change or just letting inertia keep you where you are then you are throwing away the most precious thing you have - the moments of your life.

So get out there and MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. Don't sit around and wait for them to come to you.

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Permalink Reply by James Kay on February 5, 2011 at 6:37am

Well now, Mike, I'm not only OLDER than you are, I'm a LOT older than you are; as in 69 3/4.

As far as I can see, nobody here has mistaken patience for sitting around and doing nothing just to see what happens by itself. The lecture was probably not necessary.

At the age of 68, I packed up and moved from Maryland to Taipei, Taiwan, got married to a native who speaks only a bit of English and began studying Chinese. Nobody can claim I don't make things happen.

For me, and for many others, it's people and relationships that are the most important and rewarding things in life. Relationships take time to develop because people's feeling about each other don't just happen, they take time and attention. Being wiling to invest the time that your goals require is an element of patience.

Sometimes, you really do have to just sit back and let things happen after they have been launched.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Huckabee on February 5, 2011 at 7:50am

A. The name is Mark not Mike :)
B. Some people do sit around. See this post as an example.
C. You took my response personally even though it wasn't aimed at you. There are a lot of other people here and the average age is probably somewhere around 27.
D. It wasn't a lecture. My original post sparked a lot of comments so I thought I would explain my feelings better.

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Permalink Reply by James Kay on February 5, 2011 at 4:40pm

Well, Mark, the fact that you do not recognize your 'I'm older than you and therefore I know more" lecture for what it was doesn't change what it was.

I have a lifetime of experience with that particular lecture model and identified it as a fraud at an early age. Nothing has changed my mind about that and I don't personally resort to it.(I was attempting a parody of you as a way of drawing your attention to what you had done.)

The fact that I responded to you does not mean I took your lecture personally. I means exactly as you described in item "C" above; it was 'aimed.' When you go around 'shooting,' you cannot always predict who will shoot back or how.

Generally speaking, attempts to 'explain better' rarely do that. What they do is further suggest that we have already understood you correctly and the attempt to change our minds only reinforces the original impression.

Perhaps you should look above at your A B C D format and try to see your strong tendency to lecture. Everyone else sees it.

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Permalink Reply by Monika Pedersen on February 5, 2011 at 8:59am

Patience is some sort of energy in your body that can have the power to calm and create a serene background, in my opinion. Not always is it good, having to tie down real emotion like anger and frustration, though other times it can save us from making drastic decisions.
For me, piano comes to mind. Such patience to play those scales with a metronome! but the even in 30 minutes, you can see improvements :)