Pursuing Patience

As an impatient person, I find that one of the things that irritates me the most is when I attempt to do something that I have never done before, or something that I have difficulty doing.

My first experience driving standard resulted in me truly understanding the depth of my impatience. A force from within, a combination of exasperation and frustration fought its way out of me as I stalled on hill after hill.  I cried.  Not helping the situation was my teacher, who was also an impatient person.



My friend on the mountain, he's a great boarder!



As time went on, I found myself regularly testing my patience. Around 2001, I tried snowboarding.  To this day I have trouble recalling why I insisted on returning to the mountain after the first time.  I am the type of snowboarder that real snowboarders hate. I am a nuisance and a danger. I clumsily attempt to gracefully vacate the chairlift, fail, and then barely pick myself up in time to avoid getting smoked by skis. I have zero speed control, and I am usually throwing a temper tantrum. I have cried 90% of time times I was on a mountain.  I ventured as often as I did to give the sport a fair chance, and because I was a conformist.  I have since given away all my snowboarding gear. I am no longer a conformist and I realize that I am simply too intolerant to pursue it any further. I also don’t like being cold.

As I get older and acquire wisdom, I learn how to control my indignant outbursts. I used to be guilty of “Road Rage”, until I realized that getting so angry at the people on the roads was only adding to my own stress levels. This has somewhat manifested into “Sidewalk Rage”, where I constantly feel irked at people walking slow in front of me. I have started using the same mindset in dealing with this as I used when abolishing the road rage.  Getting frustrated at people for going slowly even when I am not in a hurry is the epitome of impatience.  I truly am an impatient person!



FAIL!



 Unfortunately, I have not discovered any tactics in combating the agitation I feel when trying something new.  Prompting me to write about my impatience is my recent attempts to fix my own PC.  Not only is this is something that I am new at; it is also something that is reasonably complex to the average person.  As you can predict, I experience complications.  Each time I open the damn thing up and asses the hardware that I’m going to have to move and unplug and unscrew, I feel overwhelmed. I almost give up before even starting. A user manual is usually provided, but I can’t find the patience to leaf through it. After I calm down, I usually start unscrewing and it eventually makes sense.  I put it all back together and enjoy the momentary pride: a self satisfying reward for a job well done. Then, something goes wrong. Usually, it is something big. The force returns; this time it’s exasperation and frustration boosted by raw anger. I literally have to sit on my hands to avoid smashing the fucking thing to pieces and throwing it in the alley.  I almost cry, and then I give up.  I do not have the patience to fail repeatedly

As time goes on, I continue to try to cultivate patience. I walk away from discouraging projects and return to them later, realizing that sometimes a different frame of mind will provide different results. Sometimes I continue on with things regardless of recurrent defeat;  I am fortunate to have a patient person in my life to assist me and encourage me to persevere when dealing with my PC.  I am currently playing several games of chess on the Iphone. I have played over 30 games and won 3. It’s frustrating, but the sense of accomplishment I had today when I finally trapped my opponent’s king to secure my third win was immensely gratifying.  Perhaps it is worth sticking with something, even though it tests my serenity. Perhaps practicing in these little ways is a worthwhile exercise for keeping my impatience in check.   

Wish me luck and thanks for reading!

Cheers!