What is Impatience?
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I know I am not alone when it comes to working through impatience.
Patience has never been my strong suit. I do not like to wait, in particular when it comes to anything I deeply desire.
Time may be an illusion, but that doesn’t mean that you can go completely without patience.
Impatience comes particularly easily to our society, too. Our quick-fix, instant-gratification society simply has no room for patience. We desire it all, and we desire it all RIGHT NOW. If I can make a call to the other side of the planet, how come I can’t travel a mile on the highway in less than a minute?
Impatience can be more than just a nuisance, however. Impatience, I believe, is just another manifestation of fear.
Let’s take a favorite Star War quote from Yoda, shall we? “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” Replace fear with impatience, and the sentence still tracks rather well.
When we become impatient, we often get angry. What am I still waiting for? Waiting just irks me! Then the anger turns to hate. I hate waiting on this, that or the other thing! From there, hate tends to lead to suffering. I got sick of waiting, so I pulled onto the shoulder…and got a ticket…or into an accident…and thus the payoff was something I did not desire.
Why do we have impatience?
I believe that we become impatient because we are afraid that the thing we anticipate may not come to us. Whether it is an every-day matter, like getting from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’ in a timely fashion, or getting to work on time, or checking out at the grocery store; or a more significant matter, like waiting to hear back from a job interview, for test results, or the acceptance of an offer on a home – we do not desire for it to fail.
Because of our tendency to constantly wonder “what if?” we frequently head down a dark path. What if it does not go as we desire, and we are late to work, stuck in the check-out line past the time we need to get the kids from school, or we get a negative test result…what will happen? When we “what if” ourselves too much, we tend to get anxious, which is also rooted in fear…and that makes us impatient.
Fear is something that takes any number of shapes, and is constantly all around us. This is because we find ourselves living in a fear-based society.
What does living in a fear-based society mean?
As a society, we tend to react fearfully to the unknown. For example, when someone tells us they are about to take a leap of faith. Rather than congratulate and encourage them, we instead tend to warn and caution them. When someone does not follow societal norms, we worry about them, rather than cheer them.
What’s more, many of our so-called leaders use fear to disempower us. They emphasize our differences, and play upon our fears of loss and suffering with lack and scarcity. Illegal aliens are taking your jobs; gays are taking away the legitimacy of marriages, and similar bullshit to disempower and scare you into following them.
Further, our fear-based society drives impatience. Because fear of lack and scarcity and running out is so flooded into us, it’s difficult not to buy into it. Because we do, we believe that things will run out, whether tangible or intangible.
There is not enough time; money; jobs; resources…does it matter? Feel familiar? Because we are so bombarded by this idea, it becomes second nature, and feeds our impatience. We accept this as our reality, and so we also accept that which we fear to drive us to be impatient.
How can we lessen impatience?
Of course, what we most want is a quick-fix, instant gratification idea. The first thing we need to accept is this:
TIME IS AN ILLUSION
Every single one of us perceives time uniquely. This is why sometimes you feel each second with excruciating clarity; or before you know it, the sun is setting hours after you began a project. The clock is but a means of measurement, and not the truth of time.
As such, it may be easy to lessen impatience, or it may take “time” to be more patient.
The following may also help alleviate impatience:
Meditation: Really? Doesn’t that take time? Yes and no. Meditation in practice is taking time, as little or as much as you care to use, in order to commune with your higher self, to focus on your breathing and release your mind. I find that the daily practice of meditation is very calming, and more calm builds more patience. So, really, this can help to lessen impatience.
Practice mindfulness: Along the same line, being more aware of the here-and-now, and what you are thinking and feeling in the moment, will lessen impatience. When you know what you are thinking and feeling, you can recognize that you are feeling or acting impatient. As such, you can do something to change that.
Take a break: Step back. Stop what you are doing. Change course. In diverting yourself, you open yourself up to identifying and stepping back from being impatient.
Impatience happens
You will note I never state that we can remove impatience, only lessen it. Yes, you can develop more patience and be more understanding of the nature of impatience, but it is not something that we can be rid of in totality.
Also important to note, I never wrote that impatience is bad. But because it is a part of fear, it tends to be a negative. Consciousness creates reality. When you feel impatient, you tend to draw more things to you that will add to your impatience. Hence why lessening a tendency to be impatient is a good idea.
What do you do to work through impatience?
This is the three-hundred sixty-fourth entry in my series. These weekly posts are ideas for, and my personal experiences with, walking along the path of life to consciously create reality. I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way, and empower myself and my readers with conscious reality creation.
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