Universe: Allow patience to complete its course

In our Internet-powered digital world, patience has outlived its utility — like money order. It’s a word that seems to belong to another, bygone era. It still has some charm associated with it, but is largely superfluous in our day and age when digital transactions take less than two seconds to process, as our payment apps mandatorily testify to us.

Is patience still a virtue to be cultivated? Isn’t this entire AI-driven technological revolution aimed at making information and groceries ever so readily available to us, and thus override the necessary human condition to be patient? And that’s where the rub is. Patience is a natural and necessary precondition to be human. A man’s — or a woman’s — life doesn’t consist in the abundance of things or information he may possess, but in his willingness to be patient with his fellow beings.

One needs to activate his “patient mode” for only a fraction of a second to be able to avoid a road accident or an instance of road rage — the unfortunate events that tend to extract a huge human cost. Do this experiment next time you are behind the wheels, and see if you can drive past another vehicle without swearing at its driver, even in your heart. This experiment is necessary because the kind of patience we have with strangers is often a reflection of the measure of patience we have with our colleagues, friends and family.

We are often more patient with the outsiders than with the people in our own homes, or organisations; in fact, it is our own who bear the brunt of our impatience most severely. We want quick — and favourable — responses from our loved ones, without wanting to give them the time to prepare for an appropriate one. We forget the simple truth that those close to us are not machines; they are humans and not our AI companions.

Revolutions often fail not because of stronger adversaries, but because friends within the same camp fail to develop the virtue of patience towards each another. Revolutionaries tend to become worse than what or whom they sought to replace because at the last and decisive step, they are shaped by impatience and distrust.

Patience must be allowed to complete its course. Be more patient with a friend or a spouse than with a stranger.

Above all, the virtue of patience must be developed not merely because we want to get along with strangers, and friends, and our spouses, but primarily because we want to get along with life itself, which is often unrelentingly cruel and unjust.

‘God Sees the Truth, But Waits’ by Leo Tolstoy must now be considered a story most offensive to our postmodern sensibilities: how can a man suffer for decades for a crime he never committed, and then die without any apparent resolution? But it is, in fact, the seeming absurdity of the story that restores our faith in the human spirit. Patience perfected the character in isolation and suffering. We may have escaped the fate of Ivan Dmitrich, but all of us at some point in our lives would have found ourselves caught in an inscrutable and implacable bureaucratic maze, a kind that would force one to the depths of despair.

Patience, which can’t be downloaded as an app, is the only thing that keeps you afloat. Patience, which is the divine outpouring of the conviction that God sees but waits.

— The writer teaches in Prayagraj

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