Is patience a virtue?
When I was little, I’ve been told many times that I should be more patient. When reflecting on it now, I can see that my impatience was actually feeling annoyed during boring activities or conversations. As any other kid would do. And maybe, any other adult would do too, but over time, we were told for so long to be patient, that we started tolerating the annoying, boring, and bad. We consider it normal. We consider it to be a virtue.
Patence & / ~ Suffering
Patience is suffering.
It really is. I was thinking about it when I was analyzing the Czech or Slovac equivalent: trpělivost. Something like a ‘sufferiousness’ if that’d be a word. Maybe patience sounds just better — despite it reminds me of the patient. (We could discuss whether there is any correlation as well.)
From Latin patientia (“suffering; endurance, patience”), from patiens, present active participle of patior (“suffer, experience, wait”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *peh₁- (“to hurt”)
Source: mr. Google; Wiktionary
What problem do I have with suffering?
Well, I do not — if it is a chosen suffering, it may bring freedom at some point, or better conditions. (Like sports are the stress for our body but since directed the right way, it makes us stronger.) Yet, do we have to suffer? And do people really choose to suffer? I also say in my The Freeist presentation that some people enjoy suffering. (More on this some other time.) And others are even seeking it.
(I wish we just understood we can do things with joy and curiosity... Which we will never do, because we try to be good enough and better to get finally the love and appreciation of our mother, or her projections on our future partners until we die. So, we will keep suffering, we will keep doing more and bigger unless we give appreciation ourselves to ourselves.)
The problem I have with patience, as I do have a problem with consistency, is that it is usually controlled, directed, and it misses awareness. The reality of the ‘patience’ of most people is, that they are just compliant with everything that comes. They do not follow up, they are not proactive, they do not try to get their own way, they allow others to be mistreated or they stay in relationships and jobs that suck.
When we are being repeatedly told that we should be patient — this includes in the situations that we actually hate, we should tolerate being mistreated, or surrounded by people who are unpleasant to us, we should be patient and wait till slow people will finish something, we should be patient and not push things forward, we should be patient and wait at that job or relationship because something will maybe change over time (no), we should be patient with people who intentionally waste our time (oh and of course, we should be accepting everyone in our life), we should be patient with waiting in the endless queues and waiting for the doctor's appointment for months in the countries with socialistic health care (like central Europe), we should be patient with the guy who is supposed to come to fix the water for months, we should be patient with being in the class with others where we are waiting for everyone, without seeking the alternative.
The patience, the suffering is telling us ‘suffer and do not seek an alternative’, ‘suffer and do not express rage’, ‘suffer and wait, your suffering and time do not matter’, ‘you do not matter’.
There is an alternative, the positive about the idea of patience — and it is to enjoy the process. It is the positive perspective of patience when you are enjoying watching how slowly the tea pours into your cup, when you are driving for its own sake, observing nature, when you enjoy the process of building new connections and relationships, and you do not seek for some end, but you appreciate the new angles and shades, the good and the bad, you learn about others and thus yourself as well.
This is the chosen joy, a chosen process you want to take and see fully with your eyes wide open. So as you find yourself a sport that you like and you are looking forward to practicing it — and not when you patiently count the minutes till the end of the group class. It is when you are choosing yourself the job or duty that you enjoy doing, that you enjoy waking up for — and not patiently waiting if something magically changes about your current conditions that make you anxious. It is when you are intentionally seeking a healthy relationship when you work on yourself to break the bad patterns (others only reflect ourselves), and not when you patiently wait if something will change maybe in a month, a year, or after the marriage.
The whole idea is about intention and awareness. If we perceive patience as a virtue if we perceive ‘let’s suffer just a bit’ as something good, we often go against ourselves, we often rebuke ourselves, we are hitting ourselves like a horse that’s running for days faster and faster, we allow the bad to us — because if we don’t allow it, it doesn’t come, or it leaves.
But then we can intentionally choose the better — surroundings, relationships, work, ourselves, our food, the services we are using. We are looking for an alternative, we rethink, we think outside of the box, we build our own table of tasty food, of opportunities, and we do not only choose from what has been offered (most people only eat what has been given and do not even choose from it).
Choose yourself and enjoy the process.
Why do I care
I know, I know, you may think why I am even reflecting on it and how I get such ideas. Maybe I just have nothing to do (besides running three communities, doing IT work, writing, working out, traveling, doing my live streams, preparing the podcast, and reading a book a week).
Well, I have been reflecting on the patterns and beliefs we keep repeating or holding since our childhood. This got me to identify what we’ve been told in the past and is actually not true — we’d just be repeating the family patterns or their directions, without breaking free.
Be humble
Another one I’ve been reflecting on in the past was ‘being humble’. I do not believe it’s a virtue anymore at all. I think it kills our potential (which is something that people who keep telling you to be humble love to ask you for indirectly, because of their unconscious fear of feeling below you. If they wouldn’t think this — or their subconscious — they wouldn’t compare with you in the first place. Thus, they wouldn’t be telling you what you should do and who you should be — like being humble.)
I believe it’s good to be kind. Being kind doesn’t mean saving the world, it doesn’t mean putting everyone else first and it doesn’t mean helping everyone without them asking, nor even when they are asking. Overall helping out should come from our initiative when we intentionally are ready to help out. When we want to help out.
And we can and should only help out if it is mindfully something we want to do, mostly for our own pleasure of making a good deed. Otherwise, we do for others conditionally, expecting stuff in return and all this is just resulting in some bad stuff, blaming, and no joy for the one who receives at all. But all this is better explained in the Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand and you better just read it and treat yourself well first.
I wrote about humbleness a few months ago on my Facebook and I think it should have its space here as well. So, let me copy-paste it here and wish you a lovely day.
Is humbleness {скромность / skromnost} a virtue?
When I was little, I was told to be humble (and strong).
How it looked like?
*I thought that talking about my achievement is not right.
*I was invalidating my own success (and maybe, therefore, even of others).
*It felt uneasy to accept anything from others because I thought that I don’t deserve it — it felt too good and ‘I must be humble’.
*I didn’t aim that high — I was limiting my potential because I thought that by being better I might not stay humble.
*I didn’t do the best for myself, because I thought, again, that I don’t kinda deserve it. And, if I did something, I was trying to explain why I need it.
In fact, humbleness is a chicken-egg problem.
Didn’t you achieve more because you’re humble,
OR
Are you humble because you didn’t achieve more?
When you strive for something, I observed these phases of progress:
1/ none
2/ through goals & discipline
3/ authenticity (without controlling yourself)
4/ continuation
E.g. You didn’t know reading (phase 1). Then you learned reading (phase 2) by repeating the letters, you had some goal (read a fairy tale). Then, reading became authentic to you (phase 3, you do not take the exam every day that you really know the letters). And, you are able to teach it to someone else (phase 4, though, in this case, I am not sure how much self-actualization you will have from it, since it seems simple to us nowadays).
When we’re really good at something, we don’t feel the urge of talking about it. However, there’s a point in accepting these successes as our own.
Talking about our achievements provides us with more credibility. By invalidating them, you don’t achieve much (despite you can seem humble, congratulations).
The idea that you will be sitting home, doing something very well and/or being talented, and the world finds out by a miracle — this is a naive romantic fairy tale.
One of our tasks in our life is to find out what we are good at ourselves. Becoming better at it. Accept it. And then, being able to sell it to others. (You don’t have to sell it literally, but being able to present it the way that others trust you you’re good at it.)
Talking about your skills is a form of personal branding. Personal branding is not something extra we do.
It’s EVERYTHING we do.
Every way you talk about yourself, every time you present yourself, everything you do the way you do — this is the way you market yourself.
If someone has the excessive need to prove they’re good, they might not be so good. / Show off. ~ You know what I mean.
If someone is able to present what they know without any excessive pressure in it, that’s the way. I am sure you can think of some examples. It’s when you see how the topic or thing is natural to the person. It’s authentic. They *became* the skill.
If you invalidate your skills, because you think it would make you look arrogant, you are killing your potential and opportunities to become better. You stand in your own way.
Then, you can blame the world for not seeing your talent.
Or, you can say that you’re humble and that’s a virtue. Teach your kids the same. Plus, don’t forget to judge them if they ever want something good for themselves.
Yay.
— —
With love,
Sam
