The Pause

I remember in my twenties frequently praying for God to give me patience. I was impatient and aware of it. I struggled to wait for things and sped up everything I could speed along. I hated being pregnant because I wanted the baby to be here already. I never suffered the kind of violent road rage that makes news stories, but I definitely cursed under my breath and slammed my hands on the steering wheel in frustration. I know that much of this was an impulse to control the universe and in my religious mind, I thought of it as a kind of “pride” that I needed to repent of, which was why I so earnestly prayed for patience.

A friend of mine heard about this and warned me that praying for patience was an invitation for God to teach it to me through trials and hardships that I wouldn’t like. I suppose I have lived through plenty of hardship, though I’m genuinely not sure that what I’ve experienced taught me patience. Losing a child to stillbirth wasn’t conducive to learning patience. And divorce? Well, I suppose that my attorney did try to tell me that I just needed to be patient and that the court system isn’t speedy. She was right, but I also didn’t learn patience. Mostly what I practiced was mental distraction, which might pass as patience in certain situations. I tried not to think about things I didn’t control and that helped me not feel so out of control even though I was powerless.

But I recently found myself talking about how I’ve been surprised that I actually don’t find driving to be stressful anymore, even if there’s a traffic jam that Google Maps tells me will make me increasingly late to work. I don’t think this is simply a mind shift. That is, I don’t think it’s something that I could turn on in my brain through sheer force of will. I think what happened was related to practicing meditation on a regular basis. Who knew that practicing patience would lead to—more patience? Well, if you’d tried to tell me that lying down and learning to quiet my brain would help, I’m not sure if I’d have believed you.

I was doing a long meditation and found myself trying to get a tense muscle to relax. I focused on it, tried to convince my brain to let go—and it didn’t work. You’d think that I would have control over my own body, but no. The more I tried to get that part of my body to relax, the more I was frustrated by the reality that it wasn’t happening. I tried to work around the problem by focusing on other parts of my body, and that worked—to a degree. It didn’t get my tense muscle to relax, but it got me to focus on something else. And when I circled back, the tense muscle was still there. I told myself over and over again that this might not be something that was going to happen immediately. That’s the way it is, sometimes. Patience is less of a thing that you can actually touch and quantify. Patience is more the practice of seeing that there is a thing that you want and can’t control and simply continuing to be aware of that thing without being able to control it. Does that make any sense at all? Yeah, to my old brain it wouldn’t, either, so I don’t blame you if you’ve read this far thinking I’m talking nonsense.

What I think meditation has enabled me to do is, in the end, accept the idea of a “pause.” I find that as I practice NOT solving problems right now, NOT working on things right now, just seeing them and being attentive to them without the demand that they will be fixed immediately, I am able to react in a less fiery way. I was about to write “react less,” but that isn’t really true. I’m still reacting and I’m not really trying to ignore or even eliminate an emotional response to a particular problem. It’s just that I’m learning to accept a pause for reflection.

This has turned out to be helpful in many situations, including in my job in dealing with angry customers. I can take a breath, as I’ve practiced in meditation, and consider my options and then choose between them. Maybe that’s not patience, but it’s what I wanted when I prayed to God for patience. Maybe I should thank God for the gift, forty years late. But I probably won’t. As you know, I’m going to hell and God and I are no longer really on speaking terms since my daughter’s death. I don’t ask him for things anymore and I usually mostly hope that he’s not paying any attention to me because it didn’t go well for me when he did.