Patience

During my first grade, I was assigned to I – Patience. I remember, upon hearing my mom inform me of my section, I immediately disliked it. Aside from the fact that it was the afternoon crème section (morning crème section was I – Diligence), I thought the word patience sounded plain and boring. There was no oomph to the word. Please forgive my ignorance but I did not care much for the meaning of words back then and I only judged them just by how they sound. Much to my dismay, they were unable to re-assign me to I – Diligence. This experience symbolically started my love-hate relationship with the word patience.

Googling the definition of patience, this is what I got:

patience [ˈpeɪʃəns]

n

1. tolerant and even-tempered perseverance

2. the capacity for calmly enduring pain, trying situations, etc.

3. (Group Games / Card Games) Chiefly Brit any of various card games for one player only, in which the cards may be laid out in various combinations as the player tries to use up the whole pack US equivalent solitaire

4. Obsolete permission; sufferance

The definition of patience highlights why I would want to love it. Being patient is having that perpetual calm EVERYTIME things don’t go your way. But, ironically, the odds are there are a lot of things that won’t go the way you want them to go: an MRT train bogs down when you need to be at the office as early as possible for an important meeting; your boss is pressuring you for an information you can get from the web but the internet connection suddenly slows down; you encounter a traffic jam while you are suffering from LBM; you haven’t had lunch and everything in the menu takes 30 minutes to prepare; the queue you pick towards the tollbooth seems to be the slowest of all the lines of cars. This is one of my many battles and, chances are, yours as well.

There are days that I win and days that I lose and it’s that losing that depresses me. Whenever I see how much of my patience I can stretch only to lose it at the very next second seems very frustrating. Like a rubber band, it feels like my patience is back to how it was the moment I lost it. Sometimes, I even hear myself saying “Back to square one”. And these times re-affirm my belief that it is never the rigidity of my battle plans that would win it for me.

Simply put, I want to be a patient person. But, I realize, it can never be achieved overnight. Patience is a process. This is one of the many things God changes within us that is “from glory to glory”. We have to be patient in becoming patient. ;)