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Today's
Meditation:
Everything
is relative, isn't it? Time is that way, of
course. Sometimes we get impatient, thinking that
something should happen faster than it is happening, not
keeping in mind that sometimes we simply have to wait for
life to take its course. It's easy for us to
remember that we can't pick tomatoes until the seed
sprouts, the plant grows, the tomatoes come out and ripen
and are ready to be picked and eaten. But at our
jobs, that promotion may be waiting for us to mature in
our work; our children may need more time to grow into
certain behaviors; people we know may need more time to
get to know us.
In my
life, there have been many things that have taken me a
very long time to learn, especially in interpersonal
areas. Not having any effective teachers when I was
young, I needed a lot of time to learn things later on my
own and from people other than my family. Some
people expected things from me that I wasn't able to do or
give yet, and I try to keep that in mind when I'm
expecting things from other people. Perhaps they
just aren't ready.
It's
easy to understand when we consider just how focused our
society it on saving time and getting things done
quickly. We want everything to happen now, and I
know people who always expect a reply to their text
messages immediately-- and they get upset if that doesn't
happen. We have microwave ovens to cook our food
quickly, and phones in our pockets to contact people at a
second's notice. This focus on speed makes it much
more difficult for us to be patient in other areas.
Developing
patience seems to be a much more difficult task these
days. This isn't our fault, necessarily, but we can
do ourselves a huge favor by stepping out of the
"fast lane" and learning how to do some things
more slowly and more carefully, letting them take their
time to be done. If I have a room and a paint brush
and a can of paint, I'm not going to be able to paint the
room in five minutes-- if the job's going to be done well,
I need to allow enough time for it to get done.
Impatience won't help me in the slightest bit.
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For further
thought:
One of the
expressions of Western over-reliance on technology can
be seen in the lack of patience in industrial society. When you deal
with technology, everything happens at the touch of a button. This
conditions you to become so impatient that when you have an
emotional or personal crisis, you don't allow time for the solution
to take effect. This leads to all sorts of rash responses,
like quarrels, fights and so on.
The Dalai Lama
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