Patience Versus Waiting

I think a lot of people confuse patience with waiting, when, in point of fact, they aren't even close to the same thing. I believe that patience is actually a state of being, whereas waiting is actually an affirmative action (even though it doesn't sound that way at first. Everyone has done the waiting thing from time to time, but in my case it took me seeing how much of a failure waiting proved to be before I was ready to give patience a try.

Patience is something you can exercise, a way you can be while you are living your life and pursuing your passions. I think it allows you to have even better vision of life as it comes your way and greater appreciation when your dreams to come to fruition. If you are patient, then you have a broader definition of success, because it can mean different things at different times in different areas of life. It allows for growth and breathing room...for positive feelings at the positive developments in the areas of life that are going well that can help sustain us until the other areas of life that aren't going as we'd hoped get to where we want them to go.

Waiting, on the other hand, is not nearly so healthy or successful. Telling someone to "hurry up and wait" is one of the worst pieces of advice in the history of advice. It's something people affirmatively do, and it has all kinds of negative consequences (i.e., narrower vision and definitions of success, putting one or more areas of life on hold, and delusions of martyrdom instead of appreciation once whatever you thought you wanted actually arrives, if it ever does). With waiting, success is generally defined as one way only and in one area of life...where you feel like a failure in general if that one thing doesn't work out exactly as you'd hoped.

Probably the most vivid example that comes to mind immediately is how people wait on their love life to begin living. They think that until they meet the person they are supposed to be with forever that their life hasn't truly begun. No matter their successes in school, career, fitness, family and other relationships, the longer such folks go without meeting "the one", the more they feel like a failure and the more a sense of unhealthy, urgent panic sets in. The cruel irony of this is threefold: 1.) their panic can lead to things like rushing, settling, and a host of other bad decisions, 2.) the things in life that are good for them tend to suffer, and 3.) it may actually preclude them from meeting the person that would be best for them (i.e., if they always wanted to take dance lessons but wanted to wait until they were married, who's to say their soul mate wasn't missing a partner at a local dance class?).

Being patient is one of the hardest things to do, but it brings some of the richest rewards in all of life, so it's definitely worth doing...but when it comes to waiting, treat it like drugs and just say no.