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Today's
Meditation:
If we don't like what our young people are becoming,
then we really shouldn't point our fingers at them and
blame them. Rather, we should look very carefully
and honestly at what we've taught them as teachers and as
role models, and then ask ourselves what we would have
turned out like if we had had those same lessons when we
were young.
Patience is a virtue that can help young people if they
learn it. So much of what we do poorly at in life
has to do with being impatient and not allowing processes
to take the time they need to come to term. Life
works in its own time, and impatient people are constantly
trying to modify it in order to meet their perceived
needs, a strategy that almost always ends in
failure. I watch young people quit a sport because
they're not a superstar their second day at it; I see kids
get frustrated and give up because they get an
"D" on their first paper, instead of realizing
that they have a whole school year ahead of them during
which they'll have plenty of opportunity to learn enough
to get an "A" or a "B."
In our society, we have plenty of influences that try to
convince us that things need to be sped up. There
are plenty of commercials that try to convince us that
faster is better so that we'll buy their products that
take less time than those of their competitors. And
we buy into it, even though the quality of the quick
product very often is much lower than that of the
competitor's product. And how often are we yelling
at kids to hurry up, so that we can get to the mall at
10:25 instead of 10:35? It's a sad world when we
can't relax and take our time for most things.
Patience. We definitely should practice it ourselves
so that our young people learn it from us. If we do
so, we're making our lives more pleasant and we're
providing role models that can give kids a great tool in
their lives for dealing with life's frustrations, instead
of teaching them to be impatient themselves.
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