All We Need is Just a Little Patience

Patience is a virtue! Those words ring internally when navigating frustrating moments. They say when we have patience we can remain calm in the face of frustration or adversity. Before the pandemic we had a multiplicity of opportunities to practice patience: at home with our kids, at work with our colleagues, at the grocery store with it's narrow aisles packed with people, on the city streets with passing cyclists and honking taxis. There is no less need for it now. Now we patiently await for our world to reopen, for our lives to go back to "normal" for a vaccine. And we are seeing scores of people unable to practice that patience, rushing to family gatherings, or crowded beaches, or pool parties, even though cases are on the rise. Usually patience can be the difference between annoyance and composure, or between fear and tranquility, but now it might be the difference between life and death.
Our tradition has long praised the virtue of patience and today we will see how relevant those teachings can be in this unprecedented time.

R. Alan Morinis (founder and dean of The Mussar Institute)
The Hebrew term for patience is 'savlanut.' It shares its linguistic root with 'sevel' which means suffering and 'sabal' which means a porter. What could these three words possibly share in common? The answer is that being patience means bearing the burden of your suffering. You tell yourself that I can bear these feelings on my inner-shoulders. holding them aloft and not crumbling under their weight.

“The situation in which we can feel impatience are numberless, but there is one common factor that unites them all. We only burn with that particular fire when the focus in the situation is on me. You are delaying me, misleading me, berating me. You are interfering with my plan or standing in the way of my needs. Sometimes that only inner voice I can hear is my ego, loudly promoting all its important needs and plans and drowning out any other voice that might whisper within.
We all tend to see ourselves as the prime actor in a drama that swirls around us....But the truth is different. We are neither so central nor independent as all that. We are actually wired into all kinds of larger circuits and systems, from the molecular to the social, and we don’t control many of the factors that have a role in shaping our lives. Least of all can we expect to rule the timetable according to which life take place. The Mussar teachers encourage us to contemplate these truths, because when we realize a deeper understanding of our rightful place in the universe, this helps us avoid getting all worked up when things don’t go just precisely as we’d like….. We truthfully have so little control over so many features of our lives that it doesn’t make any sense at all to put ourselves through useless suffering as if we did have control. And that’s just what we do when we slip into impatience.” (Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness)