ألم أقل انك لن تستطيع معي صبراً؟

Now I’m not one to call myself religious. Hell, I’d be hard pressed to call myself spiritual even, which may make you wonder why the title of my latest piece (and the header image) are a Qu’ranic verse. It’s because I want to talk about the concept of patience.

What does patience mean to you?

To the characters in the above verse, it meant one’s ability to trust in another enough not to question their motives or actions — especially when they were requested not to do so before embarking on their journey together. When they did question, it highlighted their inability to “trust” the process and thereby their lack of patience. The reason for their impatience? They come from different beliefs, so one’s actions are completely and innately alien to the other. They do no understand the underlying reasons behind the requests and/or actions — prompting them to question in defiance of the patience they were requested to bring onto this endeavor; yet they are excused.

To others, patience is often heralded as a virtue.

As far as virtues go, patience always gets sidelined for being the quiet one. It’s a cautious virtue, and one we may not necessarily get many brownie points for practicing. I suppose for me patience is exemplified in the smallest things in life, exhibited in private rather than under the public spotlight. It’s the athlete patiently waiting for their injury to heal so they can go back to their practice. It’s the mother reading a bedtime story for her children for the 6th time in a row due to repeated encores. The same can be said of impatience. It’s the driver behind you who honked the femto-second the light turned green. It’s you as you glare at the family of five ahead of you at the airport security check queue who are wearing too many metallic items for people who knew they’d be undergoing excessive security. It’s all in the details.

We, as humans, are naturally impatient in everything we do. We’re born impatient. We cry when we want to feed. We scream when we want to sleep. We kick when we crave attention. The gratification must be instantaneous. We require no intermediate stages; we just want to reach the end without delay. We grow impatient of being on the way to something new, something unknown — we crave the knowledge of its true nature at the soonest.

But humans are taught patience. We certainly aren’t hardwired with it. We prefer our rewards instantly because evolution favors instant gratification. Instant gratification means survival, and our primordial brains still seek the sweet and elusive pleasures of the instant reward — affirming our status of life. But without patience, we wouldn’t have the life we enjoy today as humans. Think of the most basic things that helped humans evolve from slightly evolved apes to rulers of the planet: Fire. Farming. Society. Industry. War. All of them were wielded through patience. No fire was struck without man striking one rock against another dozens if not hundreds of time to make it work. No man would have called any place a permanent home had he not learned the patience required to see a seed grow into a fruiting plant to ensure his survival. No society would exist had man not developed the patience to deal with his fellow man; abandoning the primitive ways of settling disputes and adhering instead to a new mantra — that of patience in order to reap long-term rewards from collective living. The list goes on…

Patience may not have been something we were born with, but it has become something we must practice if we are to coexist. The practice of patience has become essential to daily life, providing us the ability to be calmer in the face of frustration — a common adversity we all face, more so if you live in a busy city, quadruply so if you live in Cairo — and provides us the opportunity to hone our practice of it. Patience essentially makes the difference between tranquility and worry.

I think patience derives its power, not from one’s ability to transcend a situation and rise above it in order to get the long-term reward, but from the ability to internalize their frustration and channel into another form of energy — thereby utilizing patience as a self-fueling mechanism. Patience comes from knowledge. If you have the knowledge to understand how something works, even in principle, you would be able to exhibit and exert this patience — because you’re familiar that the reward is begotten through time. Those who don’t understand the process, those unwilling to put in the work, or perhaps just simply unfamiliar that the process even requires work — are those who fail to grasp the long-term reward behind patience. The athlete is patient towards an injury because they know that pushing through it would mean a worse injury — setting them back even further. They do not rest with glee. They huff, puff and curse the very day they got injured — but they are patient towards their recovery because they must be. The mother who reads her children a story over and over again is patient because she understands that the long term reward for her action is that her children will enjoy a peaceful sleep and will become (hopefully) happier people on the long run.

Patience, at its core, is an exercise in self-discipline. If you normally don’t exhibit self-discipline as an individual, then patience would seem like an out-of-line characteristic for you. But rejoice, for patience, like discipline, can be taught and you can teach yourself — suffice you find the goals that compel you to do so; it is after all, counterintuitive.