The components of patience

I came across a few loose pages this morning while reconstructing my office after the painters and carpet layers finished. They are leaves of the spotty and unbound diary that I've occasionally kept. The pages are from March 1, 2005, at time when I was reeling from my decision to accept a job offer from a large international corporate law, and the unexpected vitriol from some fellow students, but mostly a professor or two. I wrote the following about three professors and their responses.

Sweet H, she listened and offered thoughtful support over my job predicament the other day, without offering real advice, without offering vision. Comforting, because I believe that she and I share a vision of something. Compare this with K who offers support as one engaged by my promise, my future, and his active vision of it. A sense of engagement that I appreciate only slightly less. And, of course, his eccentric company is delightful and affirming in itself. Compare them both with S's self-doubting/self-righteous guidance, at once intensely self-serving but grounded in deep values that I share. I am not prepared to condemn her words or final judgment of my character just yet, as a result of self-imposed humility, sympathies, self-doubt, and desire to be generous. Perhaps these are the components of patience.

I think that I was wrong about the components of patience. Now I wonder if I was patient because my professors' responses to my decision generated enough thoughtfulness to allow patience to appear. But what are the components of patience? Certainly some forbearance of reaction. A waiting while hoping.

It seems easy enough to be patient. Simply wait and assume that good will come. And it also seems like an active discipline, because it is not indecision or mere inaction; patience may imply that an appropriate reaction is at hand and there is a readiness to react. Moreover, it seems like a discipline based on wisdom - a knowing that you do not all, that all is not what it appears to be at the would-be moment of reaction. A wisdom that a better reaction will become apparent if one waits and observes. Patience may be another word for learning. To be patient is to continue to learn. Perhaps. Especially if you accept the theory that once you begin to act, or move forward, learning stops and the application of what you have learned has begun. The theory continues that you will not start learning again until you've stopped acting. Another way to describe this theory is that patience implies hoping. The hope that forbearance will give a better outcome to expose itself.

Considering what I've written above, I draw the conclusion that with hope in a relationship, patience may be appropriate. The next question is how to practice patience. How does one trigger it? If anger or reaction generates spontaneously and without warning and can absorb all reality into itself, masking hope and other possibility, how can patience be exposed as an option? It seems to me that it must be learned to be an automatic response, as automatic as anger or reaction, it must become a reaction. Thus it must be practiced as one trains for any desired response, whether physical (as in sports, for example) or mental (as in mathematics or language). And I must practice patience.