Today, I think I may have discovered the most impatient person in the Austin area. Here’s how it went down. I leave the apartment at 5:30 in order to get to CPHS in time for our fall concert warm-up. When I pull up to the Spectrum/Parmer intersection, the light is red, so I wait as another car stops behind me. During the wait, I decide to look around a bit…to my left (the direction I will eventually be heading) there is a train crossing Parmer (backing up traffic almost all the way to Spectrum), and to my right, several hundred yards from the intersection, an Ambulance, siren-a-wailing-lights-a-flashin’, is fighting its way down Parmer through the train induced blockade. It is, of course, at this moment that the light in front of me turns green (normally a welcome and pleasant sight at this particular intersection). I decide to let the ambulance through without moving an inch from where I’ve been waiting for the past minute and a half. Suddenly, I hear the hey-[explitive]-the-light’s-been-green-for-more-than-two-seconds-so-get-a-move-on-it honk from the car behind me. I don’t budge. The ambulance passes. I turn left onto Parmer, and the car previously referred to as “behind me,” passes me and proceeds at ludicrous speeds into stand still traffic.
This display of impatience prompted my memory into remembering a book I once read in a REALife group called The Life You’ve Always Wanted. There was a large portion of the book devoted to patience. How to know if you are or are not patient…why do we need patience…how do we become more patient…that kinda thing. What stuck with me was the section on becoming more patient. The author didn’t just fill the pages with psycho-babble designed to make the reader feel good, he actually had practical ways of testing, and increasing your patience. He almost treated patience like a skill we learn and improve at, rather than something that some of us have, and others don’t. Here are a few of the practical excercises he mentioned (and maybe one or two that I made up) to help us grow our patience.
1. When checking out at the grocery store, find the line with the most people in it, and join that line.
2. When someone comes up behind you in the line, allow them to go ahead of you, no matter how many items they have.
3. Drive the posted speed limit, in the slow lane.
4. If someone in front of you is driving slower than you, slow down, instead of passing.
5. Wait behind other cars at a red light, instead of driving on the shoulder, to make a right turn.
I’m not professing to be a guru of patience. Quite the contrary. I work daily on my patience skills. Sometimes everything works out, sometimes everything explodes in my face. All the time, I am learning.
