“The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.”
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
Patience
Patience mustn’t be confused with avoidance or compliance. If you’re being “patient” about getting your bills paid off or about getting an illness treated, it’s probably not wise to wait idly for further revelation before taking action.
When we talk about patience as a relational skill, though, we’re talking about non-reactivity or emotional sobriety. Does impatience ever make anything better? To respond to a stressful situation with your own stress just creates more stress, just as responding to a hostile dog in any way except with patience only agitates it further. The secret reason why patience is considered a virtue and why this quality is vital for love and sex is that the practice of patience actually soothes the nervous system. You take deeper breaths, your brain gets more oxygen, and a host of other physiological effects benefit you.
Obsessive-compulsive traits are properly defined as both obsessive-really needing to do something all the time, and compulsive–needing to do it right now. But anything we seek that’s truly valuable is worth our waiting for, and will wait for us. And if it really can’t wait, maybe it’s not right for us at all, or is not meant to be just now. The surest emotional recovery is not situational–having what you desire–but developmental–learning how to live with the desire. To strengthen our inner quality of patience, rather than chasing the specific situation we think we want, we develop our capacity to be in right relationship to any life situation.”
– Alexandra Katehakis & Tom Bliss, Center for Healthy Sex, Daily Meditation, September 18, 2013