Patience is one of the key elements in becoming a Jedi. It sounds easy enough, but the path to patience is one fraught with frustration. Patience, while a simple concept, is often much more deep than it at first seems. When you think of patience, what considerations form in your mind? Likely the obvious…to not seem over-zealous in your pursuit of a goal…to wait until your number is called, metaphorically. In actuality, patience runs much deeper than that. There are those that wait their entire lives, but never show patience. Patience is not how you present yourself to others. It is not how you conduct your waiting. Patience is an inner feeling that all beginning Force Adepts must cultivate in their everyday lives. Meditation, for example, is one of the most difficult tasks to master for a student with a short attention span. Learning true patience is integral to meditation...and by learning meditation, you can teach yourself to be more patient.
I had a chat with a student one day about patience, and how exactly to learn it. He told me that he had been patient for a long time now, and I asked him how he had been patient. He replied “I have been patient because I have been patiently waiting.” My response to him was that if he had been patient, he wouldn’t have been waiting in the first place. Time, in Western culture, is a very linear concept. In cities around North America, people drive their cars too fast. They talk on cellular phones, eat breakfast in a hurry because they must be somewhere in order to do something at some particular time. But in Eastern cultures, time is not nearly as easily defined. Time, it is said, is what we make of it. If a long time to you is two weeks, then your patience is very low. Then, if your patience lasts for a year, are you more patient than the man who has waited two weeks? Not necessarily.
A good quote to remember is this, and I do not remember where it came from, but I remember how it goes: “I have forsaken the anticipation of my arrival for the sake of my journey.” There are endless variations on this quote, but it has a great meaning to it in nearly every form I have encountered. Why do we learn to become a Jedi? We should not. Why do we learn? Because it is learning, and learning is key. When you practice your meditations, or when you practice your breathing, do not do it for the sake of becoming Jedi. Do it for the sake of doing it. What other reason would you need?
In the end, we remember that the majority of cultures are action-oriented. When we drive a car, we are driving the car to achieve something…a destination, a release, a competition…some reason. But to learn the force is not the same as driving a car. When you learn the Force, you should be “in the car”, but not concerned with where you go, merely that you are where you are. Where you are going is not substantial until you learn to be as you are.