On patience
“Don’t push the river, it flows by itself.”
The thing about patience is that it is way easier to be patient if you’re having fun. If life feels like a struggle, your mind keeps looking forward to the future and the things you are impatient about. But what to do about it? The solution might not be easy, but it is pretty simple: create a life for yourself that feels like flow as often as possible.
The thing about patience is time will pass anyway, whether you are patient or not. And more often than not, it simply needs to pass before you reach the moment you are so impatient about. And when does time seem to go by faster? When you’re having fun. Like when you create a life for yourself that feels like flow as often as possible.
The thing about patience is that learning to be patient is the most difficult when whatever you’re impatient about is important to you. Like learning something new. Like making progress with sports. Like getting through a demanding, intense period of work. The problem is that the more pressure we put on progress of any kind and try to speed it up, the more likely we will slow it down in the long run. Like when you exhaust yourself, and instead of a steady learning pace, you end up with a few intense spurts and a lot of procrastination. Or when you eventually overtrain yourself to the point of an injury. When you burn yourself out. Creating a routine that pushes you a little but remains sustainable over the long run is the most tricky form of patience there is. It is not the kind of patience where you simply put the thought of what you want on hold and keep your mind busy with other things to make the time pass faster. Instead, this is the kind of patience that requires you to consciously be patient every single day.
And the most tricky thing about patience is that sometimes we don’t get what we want, regardless of how patient we are. But if the wait might be futile and the time will pass anyway, we could perhaps at least… enjoy it? Like when you create a life for yourself that feels like flow as often as possible. And that sure takes time too, but that process is absolutely worth all the patience in the world.
