Daily Meditation: Saturday, February 13, 2010

Patience - a virtue little appreciated by our contemporaries

02/13/2010

Patience has never been a well-practised virtue, and nowadays it is practised less and less. The way people understand life and need everything to go faster and faster leads them to consider patience an impediment and patient people to be dim, lifeless or sluggish. Yes, really, that is what people in the cut and thrust of action or business say about those who are patient. Capable people have to appear eager for a challenge, eager for success: they have to overtake their competitors, they have to get there first, without any concern for the damage they might cause on the way. But they do damage to themselves, as well; such tension, such haste can only have harmful consequences: agitation, feverishness, irritability, and so on. A Bulgarian proverb says that only those who can wait until the last minute are saved. Therefore, exercise patience. How? Start by sincerely wishing to acquire this quality.