The Power of Patience: How This Old-Fashioned Virtue Can Improve Your Life

The most important thing to know is that patience is something you do, not something you have or don’t have.

“When you are angry, you’re carrying the burden while the other person is out dancing.” The more we cultivate patience, the less anger we carry and the more dancing we’ll feel like doing.

Most of us alive today think waiting represents a flaw in some system, rather than a natural condition of life. But human beings have always had to wait—for good weather to plant crops, for plagues to end, for their loved ones to return from years at sea, never knowing if they were alive or not. The only difference now is what we wait on, not that

Not everything can be accomplished through willpower—sometimes what we need is a bit of wait power.

Your biography becomes your biology.

life will turn out exactly as we want it. Businesses and relationships fail; the stock market goes down as well as up. Ultimately our faith asks us to believe that even if it doesn’t turn out the way we wanted, it still is for the best—we

Waiting sharpens desire. In fact it helps us recognize where our real desires lie. It separates our passing enthusiasms from our true longings.

Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you, but not in the one ahead.

When you come into the present moment as it truly is, there are no problems, “only situations—to be dealt with now, or left alone and accepted as part of the ‘isness’ of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with.”