OF PATIENCE AND IMPATIENCE

I wish I were more patient.

I can sit and work for hours, but that’s because I have a persistent personality, but I’m able to admit that I’m just not a patient person.

Patience requires submission, a submission to the reality that not everything is in our control. One of my favorite seventeenth-century English devotional poets, George Herbert, captures so well in his lyric poems this difficulty. So many of his poems express his struggle to submit to God, but they are also more generally about the struggle to accept disappointments and things that are beyond our control. I love the deceptive simplicity of Herbert’s beautiful poems, the way he poetically articulates the struggle for patience. “The Collar,” for example, features a speaker who rages against not being rewarded by his “Lord,“ as does the speaker in “Affliction IV,” who suffers so many losses, yet is expected to be patient. At the end of “The Collar,” as the speaker grows, “more fierce and wild,” he thinks he hears, “one calling,” and replies, “…my Lord.” This acceptance of the situation, a recognition of a higher power, provides a peaceful resolution to the poem, at least for a moment. 

If only life were so easy.

Patience is at odds with the belief you have (or have the right to) “absolute authority,” that you can control everything. When suddenly you are faced with a challenge to that ability, you can explode. There is, of course, a range of impatience which, at its extremity can lead to violence, which we see every day in the news in its various forms. Elder abuse; the frustrated angry teenage father who kills his infant son; the angry president frustrated over the delay in his wall, who suggests that border guards shoot migrants in the legs (to slow them down), or that we should have a trench with water (like a moat?) filled with snakes or alligators and more. It terrifies me, thinking someone (let alone an American president) could even imagine such things, and needs to be talked out of them by staff who explained they were illegal, not to mention, potential crimes against humanity.

Compared to that, my impatience is nothing. Still, impatience is the sin I have to confess. It’s that time of year - the ten days between Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur - when as a Jew I’m supposed to take an accounting of myself, think of where I’ve fallen short of what I should be, where I miss the mark, like an arrow going wide from its path. The Hebrew word, Hata, which is translated as “sin,” means to go astray, as if one has taken the wrong course, strayed from the right path, and thus not reached the goal. Teshuvah, a return to the path, is what we try to do during those Ten Days of accounting, which culminate in Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). But it’s not work that’s over in one day. We are to commit ourselves to continue working during the coming year.

For years, I’ve tried to do my best, tried to do the right thing. I’m honest, compassionate, empathetic, perhaps to an extreme. I try to do kindnesses to others in my daily encounters.  I’ve been told I make the world a better place through my teaching and writing. I’m not one to feel riddled by guilt. In fact, “sin” is not a word I use often or feel is helpful. I feel pretty good about how I live my life.  But admittedly, the last two years have been very hard, and now, on Yom Kippur, I must confess to God, my impatience, my deviation from how I would like to be.  Yes, I get annoyed with being put on hold for an hour, or with problems with my computer or technology. Who doesn’t? But patience has become so difficult in one particular part of my life—dealing with my husband’s progressive neurological disease.

When the doctors first diagnosed him four and a half years ago with what they thought was Parkinson’s, my rabbi said, “may God bless you with patience.” I did not realize how much I would be called on to exercise it.  As the disease has progressed, the demand for my patience has increased in ways I’d never imagined.  First, there was my need for patience when my husband moved and ate slowly, then even more slowly; patience when I wanted to be at work rather than going with him to see multiple doctors; patience when he needs help eating and drinking, when I spend time every day running out for his food or supplies, and when everything takes longer than expected. As more things are taken away from my husband, as he loses his independence, a similar thing happens to me. I’ve lost my independence. As he suffers, I suffer. This is the bond of love. I feel frantic, anxious, and, yes, impatient. A little sedative in the morning or early evening makes me more patient for a couple of hours. Alternatively, I try taking deep breaths, but they don’t work. I pray for patience, or at least endurance.

Monks are patient. I know people who spend long periods meditating, or even go to Buddhist retreats and seem to be more patient as a result. Maybe it’s just a matter of practice. But when would I have such time?

 I think I was born impatient. My father always praised my mother for being “cool, calm and collected.” Those qualities enabled her to survive a lot in our home, even to accept her decline into Alzheimer’s in old age.  I didn’t inherit these qualities. My mother called me jokingly, “the white tornado” (after the popular commercial for Ajax Liquid Cleaner in the 60s). My mother never raised her voice, but I’ve been known to shout, as well as curse liberally.  Even my blood pressure is “volatile”—meaning that medication can’t fully control it.  “A hot reactor,” my cardiologist once called me. In the early ‘90s there was a country song by Alabama that I’d listen and sing along to, with its refrain, “I’m in a hurry to get things done. I rush and rush until life’s no fun. All I really gotta do is live and die, but I’m in a hurry, I don’t know why.”  I remember my teenage son once saying, “Happy Mother’s day, even though you really need to calm down!”

I can be exuberant and joyous—that’s the upside of my nature--but aren’t those very things at odds with calm and patience?

Impatience is natural if not nice. I’m doing the best I can in a difficult situation, where I never know what the next day will bring. My husband knows this and forgives me, because he knows how hard I try to meet so many people’s demands. But my impatience is potentially dangerous, to myself (I could have a heart attack, God forbid!) as well to as my husband. And so this Yom Kippur I promise myself, my husband, and God, to strive for patience, to try to restrain my impatient nature and return to a better way.

But I know I need help and can’t do it alone, for I do not have “absolute power.”