Patience

"Patience is the greatest of all virtues"- Cato the Elder

"Argh! Argh! Argh! Argh!!!!!!"-John Lennon

Impatience is one of the most difficult emotions to be aware of.  Its existence in the psyche is particularly nebulous.  The degree to which it is tied up with other emotions is on a par with that of overly-leveraged debt in AIG's books.  And it can be just as toxic.  Just as many financial companies have been brought to their knees by debt-leverage ratios close to the odds on this year's Kentucky Derby winner, many a soul has been crippled and twisted by chronic impatience.  

Look at the fidgeting going on in the room next time you are in a group meeting.  As each person is consumed with impatience for his turn to speak or her next appointment, knuckles are pulled, fingernails are scraped and pens are tapped.  So rarely does one return to his or her center to find calmness in a day-to-day context that when it happens it is seen in an epiphanic light.  And such moments of inner peace should be upheld as miraculous and insightful.  But you cannot just wait for them to come; you have to make a habit of returning to a continually cultivated core of patience and awareness.  

Awareness makes patience simultaneously more difficult and more necessary.  As a society we are having a harder time than ever being patient because of global warming and related threats like population growth and creating a green economy.  Yet without having patience with each other globally (all other nations, we in the US who are not employing the ostrich strategy these days thank you for your patience) no solution can reach its potential in terms of comprehensiveness and appropriacy.   

On an individual level, increased awareness makes patience exponentially more difficult.  When you have twice as many things to worry about, they interact and overlap and create stress, fear and anxiety not at twice the rate of the smaller amount of worries, but at a SQUARED rate.   A tidal wave of impatience in the face of such escalations is entirely understandable and, to live a responsible adult life, in some sense necessary.  The response to such impatience should not be repression or melodramatic outburst, but rather a mindful moment-to-moment appreciation for the present.  A healthy confidence in your own future self to be as concerned and capable as you are is helpful and reassuring as well.  But that is a topic for future Bucky to muse on.