No One Can Take Your Patience From You

There’s a Buddhist story about a preacher named Khantivadi, who roamed the countryside teaching the importance of patience. One day he was preaching in the royal gardens, and women from the king’s harem came to listen. The king got jealous and ordered his men to seize Khantivadi and torture him.

First, they cut off Khantivadi’s hands. “Where’s your patience now, preacher?” the king sneered. “Not in my hands,” Khantivadi replied. Then they cut off his feet. “Where’s your patience now?” “Not in my feet.” They hacked poor Khantivadi to pieces, but they never got his patience.

The moral of the story isn’t that you should enjoy being tortured. It’s that, no matter how hard life gets, patience is always a choice. Part of us resists this. We say, “No, I just don't have patience,” as though God forgot to give us this quality. But if you’ve gotten this far in life, you do have some patience, and you might want to acknowledge it more.

More importantly, patience is a quality we can grow and deepen by taking a closer, compassionate look at our impatience. If we do this honestly, we’ll see that impatience is one of the main things that holds us back in life. It causes us to make poor decisions, lose focus, and abandon the slow work that matters most.

Above all, impatience comes from trying to inhabit a world that doesn’t actually exist. In this world, meaningful change happens slowly. In this world, lessons take years to learn. See how arbitrary and painful your mental timelines are.

And then ask yourself whether you might have a little more patience for the person ahead of you in line, or for the ways your partner doesn’t quite grasp what you’re saying. What do we imagine lies on the other side of all this rushing anyway? Just more frustration in yet another form.

Amrita Sher-Gil, "Bride's Toilet" (1937)