What Does Patience Actually Protect?

Strength plus insight, and it changes what other people can do to you.

I have this peeve, and my kids laugh at me about it. I’ll be in a crowded hallway, or an auditorium, or a supermarket even, and there’s a single doorway out, and two people are standing right in it, catching up like long lost best friends. I’m just standing there thinking, come on. Move. It’s such a small thing to get worked up about, and it tells me something true about myself: I’m fairly brisk and efficient, I like to get the job done, and I am not, by nature, a patient person.

You probably have your own version. Someone who explains things slowly when you already got it three sentences ago. A test result you’re waiting on, for you or for someone you love. Something much bigger and slower, an election cycle, a country, a family member who just isn’t going to see it the way you see it, maybe ever. We don’t usually think of impatience as a spiritual problem. It feels more like a personality trait, or a completely reasonable reaction to other people being slow.

But patience shows up on the classic lists of perfections across contemplative traditions, right alongside generosity and wisdom, and I think that’s worth sitting with for a second. Why would teachers dealing with the biggest questions there are, the nature of mind, the end of suffering, bother naming something this homespun and down to earth? I think it’s because so much ordinary suffering, and so much interpersonal conflict, comes down to exactly this: other people not understanding quickly enough, not moving along fast enough, not getting it.

So let’s unpack the nature of patience a little.

In the Buddhist tradition, patience is likened to the earth, which is strong and can receive whatever lands on it without agitation, the banana peels included. That doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening. It’s not passive endurance either. It’s abiding. And what makes the earth able to abide is strength infused with insight: insight into the fact that many things simply take a long time, insight into how limited your actual influence is over most situations, and after a certain point, it’s genuinely out of your hands. Maybe for a long while. Maybe forever, while you wait for someone else to see the light or act differently.

Strength plus insight. That’s patience.

We’re not suppressing what it feels like, either. There might be real pain in there, physical or otherwise. Disappointment. Even moral outrage, because sometimes other people really are causing harm, or just lollygagging around instead of waking up to what’s actually happening. Patience means feeling those things inside a container that’s stable enough and big enough to hold them, without being ruled by them. Patience is the foundation of inner freedom. Without it, there’s no freedom in how you respond to your own conditions, only reaction.

What patience needs in order to actually hold up, rather than curdle into something cold, is the part worth slowing down for. There’s also something practical about pace that makes the whole thing sustainable, and a piece about the brain’s own appetite for stimulation that I think gets left out of most conversations about patience.