Patience In An Impatient World

What place does patience have in a busy world? And in a busy profession? Do lawyers even have time for patience?
Maybe, if we think about patience differently.
Patience, not as in waiting for your associate to complete a project or your assistant to return from vacation, but patience as in turning towards anger, frustration, dismay.
Patience, not in the sense of waiting at all, but in the sense of of walking right through the fire.

Transcript

Hi everyone,

It's Judy Cohen.

This is Wake Up Call 368.

Today I want to talk about patience,

Which is the third paramita.

It's also called kshanti paramita,

Kshanti.

That's spelled K apostrophe s h a n t i,

Kshanti.

And patience is not the only translation of kshanti.

If we think of kshanti as being late and waiting for someone to get ready or waiting for a traffic light to change,

We're really just looking at the tippy top of the iceberg because kshanti also translates as forbearance and tolerance,

Or to be unaffected by,

To be able to bear,

Or to be able to understand,

Which is maybe not what's happening in this picture,

But I just couldn't resist it for the cuteness factor.

So how would kshanti even work in today's world,

Which feels,

To me anyway,

Just profoundly impatient?

And then,

If anything,

The law adds to that.

The law is more impatient than impatient.

You know,

Clients want things now.

So we have this 24-7 work culture and partners and senior associates want junior lawyers and staff to finish whatever stands between them and the work that they want done so that,

You know,

Everybody is working just as fast and as hard as they can.

And I don't know about you,

But even at home sometimes I find myself expecting everybody to look up an answer and be ready and get things done because I'm running at this rapid clip,

Like there's a running happening inside of my body.

And I think so much of American culture is about efficiency,

Which in some ways is kind of nothing more than impatience.

You know,

If I can get things done more efficiently,

Then I don't have to be patient at all.

So,

Kshanti parimitta is about being more patient in those situations,

For sure,

But on a deeper level it's about bearing the hard and difficult parts of being human.

So it's not about not fighting for justice or letting yourself be walked on,

But it is about seeing that no matter how hard we work and how passionately we advocate,

We'll never get everything done.

And so can we relax just a little?

What kshanti invites us to do is to see that patience and tolerance are what we need in order to walk honestly and passionately straight into the fire of life.

To slowly and fiercely and with abundant dedication as a bodhisattva,

Right?

Slice through delusion and do the work we do and obtain justice or at least reach a less unjust place.

You know,

To create and probably not in our own lifetimes,

But in a moment,

In a space,

A little more safety,

A little more sacredness.

According to Norman Fisher,

The perfection of patience is transformative.

It transforms difficult circumstances from misfortunes or disasters into spiritual benefit.

For this reason it is a particularly powerful practice and prized and essential one.

A person who develops it has strength of character,

Vision,

Courage,

Dignity,

And depth.

He,

She,

Or they understand something profound about human beings and how to love them.

It's a ringing endorsement,

Right?

So to be clear,

Kshanti parimitta is not the perfection of wimpiness,

The perfection of being a wallflower,

Or the perfection of spiritual bypass where we say,

I'm good,

Everything's good,

Everything is just passing through,

Nothing to do.

The practice of nothing to do has its place,

But not here.

Asking the question,

How do we move towards the perfection of patience?

We could be asking,

How could I pose fewer objections to the difficulties of life?

The first noble truth of mindfulness,

Which is the truth of suffering.

Sometimes people think it's a kind of depressing way to think about life,

But the profound contribution of Buddhism and mindfulness to the world,

Because mindfulness comes from Buddhism,

This stream that I'm always talking about,

Is the insight that no matter how privileged we are,

By gender,

By ethnicity,

By good health,

By being born with a sense of ease,

By wealth,

By education,

By intelligence,

No matter how privileged we are,

We will still encounter disappointment.

We'll lose cases,

We'll upset people,

We'll be railed at by opposing counsel,

We'll be disparaged by a colleague,

We'll lose clients,

We'll fail.

And also,

On a personal level,

We'll get sick,

We'll lose people we love,

We'll age,

And even if we're fortunate enough to age slowly and in good health,

At some point,

We'll face our own death.

We can't avoid these things,

Because it's what defines the human condition and with that first tranche of things,

The lawyer's condition.

So,

That's the first noble truth.

The second noble truth says,

Yes,

It's true that suffering is part of the human condition and we can suffer a whole lot less if we stop wishing things were other than they are.

And that isn't about stop wishing that we can bring more justice into the world,

It's about stop wanting everything to be fine or stay fine in this moment and stop turning away or pushing away from things and people and situations that are painful or that we don't want or didn't ask for.

And instead,

Turn towards the difficulties we encounter and as Norman is saying,

Let them be our teachers.

That impossible opposing counsel,

What can we learn about our own reactivity,

Our own ego,

Our own competitive nature,

The traffic,

We're late for a meeting,

What can we learn about how fast we want to move through our life,

Our desire for control,

Maybe our exhaustion,

What can we learn about our own vulnerability,

Our fear?

To learn any of those things,

To be able to turn towards the small everyday difficulties of life and the big ones and place ourselves in a position to learn,

We need patience,

We need tolerance,

We need forbearance,

Kashanti.

Mindfulness notices,

Here's a moment I didn't plan on,

Didn't ask for,

Didn't want.

Kashanti reminds me I can be here.

Sure,

I can be on a beach,

I can be in my nice office,

In my house with my partner,

My dog,

My TV,

But if I'm going to really live life and become fully useful to others,

A truly great lawyer and human,

Then here is where it's at.

And being here requires patience.

The patience to learn about myself here in this moment,

From this moment.

Learn maybe from my initial responses or reaction to turn away,

To complain,

To blame,

Instead of to be with here where there are lifetimes of lessons to learn.

Norman says kashanti also reminds us that,

You know,

It's not just us,

Other people are in the crosshairs,

Are sick,

Are suffering in terrible traffic,

Which changes the inquiry from why me to I guess we're all in this together.

He says,

When suffering is ours instead of mine,

It's not suffering.

My sorrow,

My grief,

Or fear,

It's painful,

Yet it's also sweet because I share it with everyone.

This is how the bodhisattva understands the third noble truth,

The end of suffering.

Not the end of physical pain,

Failure,

Loss,

Alienation,

Fear,

And other forms of suffering,

But rather the transformation of suffering into solidarity and love.

So let's sit together.

First just finding a comfortable posture,

The posture that best supports you right now,

Today,

Whatever you need to slow down and just be present for the next nine minutes and ten seconds.

And noticing if already just in that invitation which you make to yourself,

There's impatience,

There's a pull to check your texts,

Check your email,

Check social media,

And just notice that if it's there,

Just drop it.

Simple,

Simple,

Just drop it.

And come to the body,

Come to the breath in the body,

Or the sound in your environment,

And choose either the breath or sound,

And just settle into a kind of quiet attention,

Feeling the breath flow in and out of the body,

Or noticing the sound in your environment arise and pass away.

So so and then beginning to practice with kshanti,

With patience,

Not ambitions,

Patience,

And the place that you might notice it is just in that sense of how long is this going to go,

When are we going to be done?

So or the mind not even articulating that but just on its own wandering away to thinking about something about where her family are life.

So so and if you do notice impatience in the mind or in the body,

Just gently let go of it,

Turn towards that sense of wanting things to be different,

Wanting things to be better,

Wanting things to move along,

Wanting things to move along,

And just notice oh this is impatience,

I can be with this,

I can relax.

So maybe there's some solace in at least guessing,

If not knowing,

That if I asked everybody to raise their hand who was noticing a kind of impatience in the body or mind we'd have a lot of hands up,

We're in this together,

And also the difficult things that are arising that we don't want to look at,

That we turn away from,

All hands would go up.

We had one go up.

So what is there right now that you can turn towards?

So be with,

Maybe learn something about,

Right now.

So so so Thank you for being on the wake-up call.

Thank you for your practice,

Your beautiful practice.

Take good care,

Be well,

Be safe,

And see you next Thursday.