I was recently watching an inspiring documentary on Amazon Prime called “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.” I’ve always been a fan of his music. It helps me open my heart. I rested my eyes from time to time during that documentary and listened to the familiar songs that were part of the backdrop of my twenties. The Boxer. Bridge Over Troubled Water. The Sound of Silence.
I was inspired by the music but I was equally inspired by what Mr. Simon said about his process. How he got the sounds in his head to grace his voice and his musical instruments. His guitar. Drums. Bells. What spoke to me the most was the patience it took for him keep going, to wait for the music to come, to feel it in his bones and to find the joy at the end of the long tunnel of patience. “Slow down, you move too fast,” his lyrics say. “You gotta make a moment last.”
His music was beautiful when he was with Art Garfunkel.” The harmonies were exquisite but in the documentary, Paul didn’t look happy when they were singing together. In fact, he looked sad. He said that he and his partner found each other irritating on so many levels and that took away the joy. But he beamed with happiness when he played with the South African musicians. He had stopped recording and songwriting for a couple of years before and when he returned, his joy was the reward at the end of a long and patient tunnel. When he danced around the stage, singing and playing music, I got the impression that he had finally found the joy he had searched for his whole life. He had had the patience to wait for his dreams to come true and he was reaping the benefits.
When you think about it, it seems like joy has nothing to do with patience, but they actually have a great deal to do with each other. Patience plays an important part in my writing. When I’m writing a book, I usually have a lot of false starts at the beginning of my chapters. Sometimes I write something that I consider acceptable and I move forward but when I read it back, it sounds like a hiccup. A burp. After I read it through a few more times, it doesn’t seem acceptable any more. I have to go back, delete what I wrote and take the time to find something better. When I find it and read it back, I feel happy that I was patient enough to wait for the joy to show up.
When I write with no deadlines, I’m free to patiently wait for the reward I’m looking for. I can’t predict how long it will take. There is no time limit or way of predicting how long the search will go on. “It takes as long as it takes.” So goes the old saying. But however long it takes, when I find what I’m looking for, I feel proud of how it has turned out and I know that it was worth the wait.
In my world of crafts, knitting is another example of the rewards I receive from patience. I love to knit. I’ve been doing it since I was eight years old and I make beautiful sweaters and scarves. It takes time to imagine and create them and I fall into a rhythm. I love the sound of the needles clicking together, the feel of the yarn, and the anticipation of finishing something, but there’s an all too common obstacle that slows down the process and requires patience to correct it: dropping a stitch. It happens to new knitters and veterans alike. If you drop a stitch one or two rows down, you can pick it up pretty easily, but when it drops many rows below, the only thing you can do is rip the sweater twenty rows down, pick all the sticthes back up and do it all over again. This takes patience and the vow to not give up. I used to go to a knitting store in Sherman Oaks and there was a placard on the wall that said: As ye knit, so shall ye rip.
Patience is not only about waiting. It’s how you act while you wait. I’ve been involved in a lot of disagreements throughout my lifetime that have tested my patience. Sometimes I’ve managed to
slow it all down and stop and breathe. At other times, I’ve failed spectacularly. But either way, I’ve come to understand that being patient doesn’t necessarily mean accepting something that you find to be unacceptable. It doesn’t have anything to do with suppression. I’ve found that patience is a choice. It has to do with acknowledging what you’re feeling and choosing not to act aggressively. It has a lot to do with being totally honest with yourself that you’re furious and finding the strength of be smart and wait anyway. It has to do with taking your time to be present with a situation and wait until something changes. It will, because one thing we know for sure is that everything changes.
We are all human beings, doing the best we can. Sometimes waiting is easy and sometimes it feels completely impossible. And still, we can choose how to be with it. Buddhism doesn’t see patience as a passive kind of endurance. They see it as an active, courageous inner strength that allows you to accept reality exactly as it is even if you don’t like it and maintain a peaceful mind in the face of difficulties. It is the practice of staying present with discomfort without reacting aggressively. However
long it takes to accept the truth about a situation or yourself, being able to feel
the joy is the pot of gold.
Bruce Lee said, “Patience is not passive. On the contrary, it is concentrated strength.”
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