Patience

My last entry was a bit of difficult for me to write – Did you notice the paradox? As I explained my issue with my student’s lax attitude, I exposed my own failings in patience. Patience is the 6^th of the Buddhist Perfections. I try to exercise patience and generally am quite good at it. The cultural differences in Laos between the over-ambitious American and the tranquil Laotian, at times, leave me a bit frustrated. I loose my patience. The sweet salve of Khanti parami evades me. Yet I am encouraged to try again.

It takes practice to learn patience. It is easy to loose patience. It takes a tremendous amount of energy when patience is lost. Have you ever had an argument over something unimportant? At some point in that argument, did you loose patience? Do you remember how tired you were after that argument?

When patience is lost, the unbridled mind runs amuck. Our clarity is gone, our judgment dubious. Biological mechanisms kick in, adrenaline rushes throughout, the pulse quickens. Unharnessed, the state of lost patience invites anger and hatred and the most pointless of all agendas: revenge.

“I want this person to learn a lesson,” I thought one snowy day in New York. The sidewalk was lined with mounds of snow, slush beneath our feet. At the crosswalks, - zebra stripes – the path narrows and we have to line up single file to get around the snow bank. An impatient man has lost control and in his frenzy, he kicks hard at the snow. It is only snow; it means no malice towards this man. What the #$*! Do We Know might indicate the snow has feelings. If it does or if it doesn’t, the man is out of line and I think to myself, “I want this person to learn a lesson.”

A few moments later, we have crossed the street. As the man tries to hurry around the other commuters, he slips and falls, BOOM! right on his back. I think of a neighbor years ago in Boston who had slipped on the ice and broke his ribs. He lies there on the sidewalk for hours before they brought him to the hospital. He was in an extraordinary amount of pain. Back in New York that day when that man slipped and I heard him thud onto the slushy sidewalk, I no longer wanted him to learn a lesson. Instead, we both learned lessons.

It must have taken a lot of energy to be upset with the snow – to loose patience. It took a lot of energy to be upset with the man – to loose patience. Both the man and I felt terrible when he slipped and fell. Maybe my thoughts in someway manifested his fall. Maybe I would have not spent the remainder of that day feeling bad for the man, wondering if the was stilly lying there in the slush, hoping he was ok. Maybe I would have had a better day if I had been patient with the man who lost his patience.