Don't just do something, sit there - the power of patience

So you’re standing in line at the post office and the queue seems to be completely static. You have a hundred other things you need to do today crammed into your head and you don’t have time to be stuck like this. You can feel your irritation rising and by the time you get to the front of the queue you might even be snippy with the person serving you.

We have expectations on how life is supposed to work - when we expect life to be fast, convenient and easy and it’s not we start to become impatient. This isn’t life’s fault, its just a fact that not everything happens easily every single time. Our expectations rather than life are the origin of our suffering and this can create stress and contribute to poor health.

So what can we do? The first thing is to train your awareness with some meditation every day so you notice feelings as they arise rather than being swept away. A lot of the time when anxiety and anger come up we’re barely aware of them influencing our behaviour, Looking deeply, we can see impatience for what it is - a mix of anxiety and anger. When we’ve trained ourselves to notice when impatience is arising we can then ask ourselves what’s driving it, what are we attached to - is it the other things we feel we need to get done or just simply a driving need to be productive all the time. Noticing impatience is a prompt for us to practice letting go of our need to be productive and our need to get things done. Are those things really important enough to sacrifice your wellbeing over?

When we’re aware of our impatience and we see the roots of our impatience, we can set an intention to enjoy where we’re at. When we’re stuck in traffic, we can enjoy the rhythm of our breath, the feeling of our back on the seat, our hands on the wheel. We can enjoy the feeling of simply being alive. By training ourselves to notice impatience arising it’s actually a really helpful prompt for us to be present and enjoy what’s right in front of us.