YOU DON’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT! – A LESSON OF PATIENCE DURING LOCKDOWN

Have you ever been shopping with your girlfriend to a cloth store?  Did you feel frustrated waiting endlessly, sometimes for hours before she finally picked a piece?  Or did you have to walk out in futility after she couldn’t find the right fit or design – that after couple of hours being spent in and out of the trial room?

If you didn’t feel frustrated then “congratulations”; you have a very strong muscle of patience or have built it up with regular exercise 😊

I for one am still trying to develop this muscle.  Ofcourse there is a break because of the lockdown and I am dying to get back and do some work on it.

You will agree, ‘Patience’ is one of the hardest lessons and perhaps the most frustrating to learn.  Because of the lockdown when you can only just make it to the neighborhood store and stay at home, it becomes quite challenging for most to learn the lesson of patience.  When you are sick or dependent, everywhere you turn there is a lesson in patience.  You have to learn this lesson ‘inside-out’.

One lesson of patience is that you don’t always get what you want.  You may want something right now but may not get it for a while.  You will however always get what you need, even it does not fit into your mind frame.

People have not been used to living with discomfort.  You expect results and gratification, right now.  You want answers faster than they can be delivered.  There are 24X7 service and shopping available for you.  If you were hungry, there is always food available on call, grocery on call, cab on call and all these arrive at your door step in just a few minutes.  The digital world and the internet has really supercharged our impatience isn’t it?  Everything is instantly available.

People no longer know how to wait, or even what waiting means.  It’s nice to have what you want when you want it, but the ability to delay ‘gratification’ is important.  Studies have shown that when children were given a choice to have one cookie now or two cookies after an hour, the children who were able to wait did much better later in life.  Patience is definitely an important asset, yet so many people stand in front of their microwave thinking “hurry up” while knowing fully well that it will do its job as designed and programmed.

Or feel frustrated waiting near the elevator for it to arrive and keep telling themselves “Come on! Hurry up!”

The problem goes beyond the discomfort of waiting.  So many of us don’t know how to live with things as they are, how to live in a situation just as it is or plainly ‘just be’.   We always want to feel that there is a need to change things and it is not okay to leave things alone.  We are not able to differentiate between ‘ a thing not happening soon enough’ and ‘not playing out the way  we think it should’.

The key to patience is knowing that everything is going to be fine, developing the faith that there is a plan.  It is easy to forget this and many people try to control situations that would work out as they were meant to in their own perfect time.  Even in death some accept that it’s coming and some become impatient and want to know when?

During this lockdown due to the pandemic one important lesson I learnt is that you will not be given any life experience before you are ready, when you find the trust and develop the understanding that things are moving the way they are supposed to and in their own time; only then you relax.

‘Patience’ is a muscle you must regularly exercise and what better opportunity to do that when you have been locked down in the safety of your home for the last 40 odd days.  Little things like letting the tea heat for one more minute in the kettle, that it will take at least an hour to do your dishes, or it might take another 40 days before the locked down is called off and you can get to work.

It’s so important that we develop a deep faith that healing is always at work.  Since our mind always tries to change things we need to reassure ourselves that things are happening exactly as they are supposed to be.  Your mind wants to believe that changing your circumstance will bring you peace.  Your mind thinks you got to do something.  But the reality is that you can relax in the circumstance as they are now, knowing that deep patience will bring deep healing.

‘Patience’ is an important lesson you can learn and exercise for yourself and teach your children too during these stressful times.  Learn and teach ‘delayed gratification’.  You would have already learnt by now that you need only a ‘little’ to survive and be healthy and happy.

Remember, it is not the ‘alarm clock’ which wakes you up every morning, there is an invisible force which decides if we will have another day of life to wake up to.

Everything that has happened and that which is happening is that we get to learn the lessons we need.  It will move us forward to a greater good and healing.  Let’s live life as it is happening.

DID YOU LOSE YOUR PATIENCE ALONG THE WAY WHILE YOU READ THIS PIECE?