Cultivating patience
A simple mindset shift for more peace and understanding
Bamboo from a recent family trip.
Last week, my family and I flew across the country to help my older sister move in for medical school. Spending multiple days in a row around my family tested my patience and led me to reflect on how I judge people and my expectations for them.
Why did my temper explode whenever one of them showed any sign of incompetence?
For example, my mother is not the most tech-savvy person out there. When she would struggle to unlock her phone or perform a simple Google Maps search for nearby restaurants, I would sigh impatiently and snatch the phone from her hands. Other times, when my brother would tell me to order food, I would get annoyed and ask why he couldn’t do it for once. He would always say that his phone had low battery. I suspected he just didn’t want to take on the responsibility of deciding where to eat, what to order, and how much to pay.
While there were fun and happy moments, we all got irritable on that trip. My sister was pressed for time to finish her move-in todos, my brother and I got bored waiting around while she ran errands, and everyone got hangry waiting for food orders. Our mother got on everyone’s nerves the most, with her lack of listening skills, habit of interrupting people mid-sentence, and knack for pushing her opinions onto people (i.e. my older sister) even after they start crying out of frustration.
All these little annoyances built up. It made me think, what is the most skillful way to approach all this tension and stress within our family? To accept that we will get irritable? Or suppress those feelings in an attempt to uphold harmony?
How could we find the patience to spend quality time together without resorting to arguments and tears? How does one cultivate this patience?
One of the core teachings of Buddhism says that desire is the root of all suffering. However, it’s often not an innate desire that causes this suffering. For instance, one will always experience hunger and thirst. It is the desire not to experience them that causes suffering, not hunger or thirst. When one accepts their hunger or thirst, they are okay with the discomfort. Accepting the inevitability of these innate phenomena is key.
Similarly, we can apply this idea to the topic of patience. A large part of patience comes from gaining a skillful perspective, not effort. It’s not about pushing feelings away, because bottling up feelings never does any good. Instead, having a proper understanding of the frustrating situation makes being patient easier.
For instance, let’s say you are waiting in a long line for a clinic. You could focus exclusively on your aching feet and anxiety about wasting time, or you could extend your awareness to include the stressed, worn-out clinic employees doing their best to serve each person in line quickly and effectively. Accepting both sides of the story won’t solve all the problems, but can help you attain a sense of peace regarding the situation, especially if you cannot control it.
In my case, I could not control how my family responded to each other. What I could do, thought, was expand my perspective to consider my mother’s neuroticism, which is greatly shaped by depression. Her lack of self awareness can be interpreted as a coping mechanism for dealing with life’s daily stressors. If she were more self-aware and self-critical of her habits, she would most likely spiral into guilt and shame, as she does during her most severe depressive episodes. So instead, it is better for her in-the-moment health to ignore the parts of her that cause us frustration.
There’s a quote from social psychologist and professor Devon Price’s book Laziness Does Not Exist which spoke to me and inspired me to take this more holistic view of my mother. “If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context.”
In his book, Price talks about how some of his most promising students struggle with attendance and completing assignments. It’s not because they’re inherently lazy; it’s quite the opposite. Most of the time, these students are the ones hustling with full-time jobs to balance, children to take care of, or mental health conditions to juggle on top of school work. Many of them describe themselves as lazy for not living up to society’s impossible expectations: succeed at school, go to work, hit the gym, take care of family, invest in friends, spend time with a partner, cook healthy foods, do extracurriculars, and have productive hobbies on the side.
These checkboxes society pushes us to tick are not always possible for everyone. It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to have enough time and energy to be a god in every aspect. No one is perfect. People need to prioritize, and that means some things get pushed aside. In my mother’s case, taking care of her mental state is a full-time job. Of course some priorities, like trying to keep us happy, are not number one.
Understanding why a person acts the way they do might not solve everything. I still get frustrated with my mother when she interrupts conversations with random, unrelated comments. But now I interpret these feelings as messengers saying “hey, you’re getting ticked off by this. How about we explore why?”
When I dig deeper, I find that I dislike the interruptions because to me, they signify a lack of respect for the person speaking. Over time, I fear that this supposed lack of respect will take a toll on my family, causing resentment to build until it erupts. In other words, my frustration stems from wanting to prevent conflict and keep our close relationships from fraying. Phrasing my thoughts in this way is much more productive and is more likely to lead to a meaningful discussion than lashing out.
