205. Building Patience

When I discover something new, I want to understand it immediately. I want to know its position in the interconnected web of objects that is my rational understanding of the world. I want to be able to justify its existence and grasp its full meaning.

It’s because I’m able to do this for most of the things I encounter that I expect every new thing to be quickly assimilated. Any delay in my comprehension is experienced as frustration, as though something has gone wrong. With unlimited information at my fingertips, these expectations are regularly emphasized and enhanced.

I want the meaning of all things to be revealed at once. But even a cursory awareness of my relationship with the world should make it clear that this is an impossible demand to satisfy. Meanings are often lacking and there are even things I cannot understand at all.

My desire for immediate understanding is a kind of impatience that will cause me to ignore or discard those things I cannot quickly comprehend. But to ignore or eliminate parts of my reality would be to impede my own awareness. For my awareness to broaden, I must see everything as it is and I must let everything in.

I need to learn to be more patient with myself and the world. I can help myself do this by purposefully choosing activities that require me to slow down. A prime example is reading literature. Not only does a literary text force me to read carefully, it also reveals meaning gradually. Engaging with such a text is a slow process, but the understanding that can be reached through it is often valuable.

By practicing forms of experience that are necessarily slow, I become more patient. I learn that there are meanings that can only be revealed slowly and possibly only partially. I learn that awareness itself is a long and winding road — one that I’ll be walking for the rest of my life.