What Is the Importance of Patience?
Questioner: Sir, what is patience?
Acharya Prashant: Question is, ‘What is patience?’ Well, Nothing. What you know as patience is just toleration of time. You are tolerating something, and you call it as ‘patience’.
Patience is not about accommodation, adjustment, tolerance. Patience is attention. Patience is timelessness. Patience is not when you say, ‘I can be patient for the next three hours’. Real patience is when you do not even know that those three hours have passed away. Patience is timelessness. You know patience of somehow tolerating time. ‘I tolerate time. I tolerated those restless moments, and I call that patience.’ No, that is not patience.
Real patience is when you do not even feel time. Real patience is love. In moments of love, time disappears. You do not even know that there is time. You forget about time. That is patience. When you are deeply immersed with your book. You started at 11 p.m. and you raise your head and find that it is dawn, the birds are chirping. Then it is patience. You did not even come to know when six hours passed. You started at 11 p.m. and now its 5 a.m. You didn’t even have any thought about time. It is patience. Patience is beautiful.
But the patience that we know is suffering. When you are patient, you suffer. You say, ‘I am somehow patient. I am forcing myself to be patient.’ In your patience, time stretches and elongates. One hour becomes six hours. When you are trying to be patient, one second seems like six seconds. Time becomes heavy. You wish that the clock could run faster. In real patience, there is no time. No time.
Similarly, in the patience that we know, we adjust somehow with the situation, the other person or the other object. But in real patience, you do not tolerate the other person, you do not adjust, you do not compromise. You are in love with the situation. There is no question of compromise. You are not fulfilling a duty. It is love. That is real patience. Your patience is very limited and that is why you say I am running out of patience. Real patience is absolutely unlimited.
