Living with Patience

Once upon a time, when I was young, I could sit still doing nothing for hours before moving and doing something. This habit of mine has slowly shortened the amount of time I could wait, but, I can still wait for hours before doing something. These days my patience is exhibited through my friends on video games, where they really push the limits.

Patience is a life skill that impacts many lives and the outcome of every action they make, even if they don’t realize how important patience is. One example of patience I’ve seen in public was one middle-aged man and one middle-aged woman. The man stood in one place waiting silently as the woman was hounding him for leaving the relationship. Once the woman stood silent, stopping all the thrashing and slapping she was doing the man finally spoke and said, “I can’t believe being single is so exciting after dating you.” This man ignored what she was doing and firmly etched in her mind they were over. If this man didn’t have patience in this situation, he would perchance yell back and/or cause some type of physical pain

A personal example of when patience was tested happened when I was playing a game with my buddies and one left saying “Be right back boys, I’m going to get something to eat” I replied to the others “yea he’s going to be right back.” Once he left for food I and 2 others started to play some games, just the three of us waiting, waiting until he ate the damn food. The missing friend had gone for around four hours now and one guy left the party, where I and the last one left continued talking until finally, we hear his angelic voice through the headsets we were wearing. The long wait bloomed fruit to the wonderful time we had created playing games together.

Bad examples of patience are getting disgruntled after 5 minutes or wanting to quit while fishing after not having caught anything in the first few minutes. A good way of testing your patience levels is to take one activity you love doing and stop all actions regarding it, just to see how long you could last. When someone exhibits patience they also show others the amount of self-control they have or how short-tempered they are. Those with low patience easily anger and people who easily anger have a higher chance of inflicting pain onto others.

Patience is just about how long you wait for something, patience is also about how you act once you finally reach the end of what you were waiting for. One may say they have patience but if they are waiting on a friend and start complaining or yelling at them after waiting, then the patience they said they had is all but null.

“Meditation II” by Roshnii is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.