Patience is a virtuous decision
Patience is not a feeling. Patience is a decision; a decision to behave in a certain way.
I bring this up because the other day I found myself “feeling” awfully impatient with my kids. Trying to pull myself back together, I couldn't get past the “that's just the way I feel” trap so many of us get stuck in. I realized, then, that I wasn't really feeling impatient. I was feeling weary, frustrated, overwhelmed.
And because I had those feelings I was certainly acting impatient (just ask my kids). I felt less stuck, though, because I knew I could do something about my actions.
I've always figured that there is not a lot we can do about our feelings or emotions. They tend to arise in response to things that go on in our external world, whether we like them or not.
If I get sad about something someone says to me, I just feel sad. There is no use pretending otherwise. If I'm angry because someone cuts me off on the expressway, I'm just plain angry. If the sun is out and the temperature is perfect and I feel happy, then I might as well enjoy it.
Sometimes our emotions do arise in response to things we are thinking. If I start thinking about all the things that can go wrong next week, I will probably start to feel anxious. So I can change the way I feel to some degree by trying to think about something else. That actually works some of the time.
Most of the time, though, I'm stuck with the feelings I feel. I do diminish their power over me by being able to identify them, and even figure out why I feel them. All the identifying and figuring out in the world, though, may still leave me feeling out of sorts. That's where behavior comes in.
No matter how I feel, most of the time I can still choose how I behave. I say “most of the time” because I recognize there are those times when our feelings are so overwhelming that it seems like we have no control over anything.
Also, sometimes our emotions are based in our biochemistry, over which we do have no control. Usually, however, we can choose to behave differently from how we feel. We can act patiently, then, even if we feel weary, frustrated and overwhelmed.
It's not easy, mind you. We may have to take a deep breath, or grit our teeth, or take a five-minute timeout for ourselves, but we can control our behavior. Once we give ourselves permission to feel one way and act another, we actually wind up feeling better about the way we are acting. We actually can change our feelings to some degree by how we choose to act.
If you buy all this, then you can see why it is so important that we see patience as a way we choose to behave, rather than a feeling we have. It simply gives us a lot more control over how we live, as well as what sort of person we are to live with.