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.

Oh, the qualms of being liberal!

One of the classes I am substituing for this morning is watching "Oliver Twist", the Roman Polansky version (which I recommend, and would do so more highly if I could picture ever being in the mood to see it of my own volition). My favorite quote comes after Oliver has been thrown in the coal shed at Mrs. Sowerberry's. Mr. Bumble tells her he never would have behaved violently (after his mother was called a whore) if she hadn't fed him meat. "Oh," she exclaims "the qualms of being liberal!" Because I helped this poor boy, she is moaning, he had the strength to rebel against me and cause me trouble!

The spirit of open-heartedness and generosity that should pervade the helping of other people is still often missing in today's society. Republican cries we have heard this week that an economic stimulus package that relies on the creation of jobs will be ultimately ineffective reeks of this same timidity in extending oneself. "We want to help poor people, we just think the best way to do it is to decrease the taxes on all the short-selling I've been doing in the stock market this year." Um, yeah. (Really, Bucky, your idea for a blog post was to compare Republicans to a Dickensian antagonist? Has it been that slow a week? Are you that bitter for not having known about short-selling ETF's yourself at the beginning of the year? Let's see where this goes...)

I have confidence and faith in the benefits of generosity and forgiveness because I have been the recipient of so much of both in my life. I'll have paid off my Perkins loans long before I can hope to have returned even a fraction of the love and care I have received to the the world. But the small ways in which I have been able to taste these ineffable emotions sustain and uplift me when I feel overwhelmed by the pervasive messages of our society about the money, power and comfort that successful people "should" be focusing on. Benjamin Franklin wrote early on in his experiments with patronage that someone is more likely to help you out after they have had one opportunity to give you assistance than if they owe you a favor for a kindness done to them. He recognized that people got more of a lift from lending him a book than from having him do something they needed for him.

This same sentiment expresses itself so fundamentally in all the cultures that I have lived in. Mo Zi wrote that our human instinct to help others manifests itself in the natural reaction to save a baby teetering on the edge of a well. Nasreddin Hoca tales in Turkey highlight the astute cleverness of helping your neighbors and the ways in which it benefits you in the long-term with stories about borrowed pots that "magically" reproduce while in his possession. This combination of noetic and cultural knowledge fills me with hope, and is sustaining.