Today's
quotation:
Patient
people enjoy the pleasure of saying to whoever is feeling
anxious
about delays--restaurant servers, clerks waiting on
the telephone to get
your credit card verified, dry cleaners
who were sure your sweater would
be ready--"It's okay. These things happen." Patience, in a rushed world,
is a
shared relief. Witnesses to patient transactions,
as well as
participants, all get to calm down.
Sylvia
Boorstein
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Today's
Meditation:
I've
been fortunate enough to know quite a few very patient
people, and to experience what it's like to be around
them. They live with a sense of peace that impatient
people just don't have. They have a balance and an
ability to go with the flow that others lack. And
because of them, I've done all that I can to develop
patience in myself--to try to recognize impatience when it's
surfacing and not let it take over and make me grouchy,
stressed, and hurried.
The
results have been very pleasant for me--and for the other
people in my life. I feel much more relaxed and
peaceful, and outside forces have much less chance of
upsetting me when I recognize that if I'm simply patient
with what's going on--rather than trying to control
situations and make them turn out as I think they
should--situations tend to resolve themselves quite nicely,
and people tend to find adequate and appropriate resolutions
to problems. Sometimes when I'm working on a project
and it's not turning out, these days I'm able to leave it
for a while and come back to it rather than trying to force
it to work out.
When
we approach life with patience, we can be peaceful
influences on others, which can be an extremely important
contribution to make in our world of today, which is sorely
lacking in peaceful influences. We can help others to
learn how to be patient, thus helping them to feel more
peace and balance in their own lives.
The
world is going to do what it does in its own time, and our
impatience isn't going to affect the world at all--it's
merely going to make us more stressed and less
peaceful. Our patience, though, can contribute a great
deal by fostering our own little corners of peace, which can
in turn influence others to foster their own peace.
And peace and patience are beautiful things to spread.
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