Teach Yourself Patience

Once we learn to associate time with attachment, and, more importantly, to realize how thoroughly we’ve become attached to time, we can turn our attention inwards. Patience is the process of temporarily abandoning this attachment to time. It allows us to simply make peace with the moment, to stop, to wait.

How much of modern society revolves around inventing things to make our wait times shorter? Computers run faster, lines run smoother, algorithms on apps tell us when to fall asleep and wake up for ‘maximum restfulness’. The result is a mass state of discontent, a mass state of impatience. Oddly enough, this causes the minds of people to become chaotic, even violent.

The less exposed we are to patience, the less accustomed we are to having to simply wait and not be doing anything, the harder it is to actually sit and do nothing. For this reason, meditation is one of the most important practices you can participate in. It’s an active resistance to this notion that ‘time is money’ and the delusion that we’ll be happy if we can just figure out how to ‘optimize’ our time.

Life is not a business. You do not need to make everything you do the most efficient version of itself. Far more likely to lead to a sense of peace, happiness, and contentment, is the practice of patience. Learn to wait. Learn to stop. Learn to do nothing and respect yourself for doing nothing.