kartooner

We’ve all heard, at one time or another, the old adage “Patience is a virtue”. Sure, it’s vir­tu­ous to be patient but to learn patience is no dif­fer­ent than adding a new skill to your per­sonal repretroire.

The Ran­dom House Dic­tio­nary of Pop­u­lar Proverbs and Say­ings traced the ori­gin of this infa­mous proverb to an alle­gor­i­cal nar­ra­tive called Piers Plow­man by William Lang­land and it hap­pens to be sim­il­iar to the Latin say­ing, Max­ima enim..patientia vir­tus (Patience is the great­est virtue).

As with all things, impa­tience is not always imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able. Rather, we tend to rush things through so as to appease the part of our­selves that loves the end result to hap­pen now, not then, but right now. This is where patience comes in and gen­tly reminds us, “Look, you might not already see what’s to come, the end result, what­ever, but that’s okay, it’ll be worth the wait.” How­ever, just when you think you have a good grasp of it, it can eas­ily slip through your fin­gers, fall through the cracks or hide under the rug (right next to that flat­tened piece of ABC gum) and only then you’ll real­ize it’s importance.

No one likes an impa­tient per­son. If you were to poll a thou­sand peo­ple from var­i­ous eth­nic, age and geo­graph­i­cal back­grounds, you’d find that a great major­ity of these peo­ple if asked, “Do you like an impa­tient per­son?” would all have the same answer. It’s a no-brainer, but it’s amaz­ing how many impa­tient souls are out there in the real world.

Next time you don’t get that Frizzo Latte Supreme in under 3 min­utes or if that guy behind the counter at the store is mov­ing at a snails pace, just remem­ber that patience really is the great­est virtue. It’s some­thing on a daily basis that I have to remind myself to embrace it’s impor­tance and uti­lize it’s strengths.