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Today's
Meditation:
I would love to be a patient person. It's not
that I'm an impatient person at all-- I'm less impatient
than almost anyone I know in most things. But when I
see truly patient people at work, I know that I have an
awfully long way to go if I'm ever to consider myself to
be truly patient.
In my experience, I may be going about trying to develop
patience in the wrong way. I've always considered it
an issue of personality, but if Hazrat Inayat Khan is
right, then it's much more of a spiritual matter, and I've
been trying to develop it in the wrong area of my
life. To me, it's been a question of intellect and
logic, trying to tell myself when to be patient, how to
react to people and their actions and words, but he puts
it firmly in the realm of spirit. And now that I
think about it, most of the truly patient people I know
have been very spiritual people as well-- not necessarily
religious, but deeply spiritual.
Perhaps what I need to do is to let my spirit take over in
matters that demand patience. Perhaps I can ask
myself, "what would I do in this situation if my
eternal spirit were fully in charge instead of my
intellect?" I have a feeling that the answers
I'll get will be somewhat different than those I can come
up with just using my limited ability to reason.
We tend not to let our spiritual sides make decisions for
us. We tend to think that if we're actually hearing
what our spirits are telling us to do, there's something
wrong with us. But many traditions have greatly
valued that "still, strong voice within" that
can help us to make decisions in ways that will be good
for everyone, and that can help us to be in touch with the
eternal spiritual element of our being that is actually
the very core of who we are. A life spent as a
spiritual being can actually be a life that contributes
greatly to the world in ways much different than those
that result from reason and logic.
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