First published at 16:27 UTC on April 14th, 2024.
https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=154428 David Gorman: If these virtues are so ‘good’, why do so few manage to achieve them?
…If we were patient all the time, would we be aware of being virtuous? Would we even be aware of being patient? Probably not.
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https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=154428 David Gorman: If these virtues are so ‘good’, why do so few manage to achieve them?
…If we were patient all the time, would we be aware of being virtuous? Would we even be aware of being patient? Probably not.
…the virtues seem most obvious when we are not being virtuous. In other words, they appear to be most noticeable by their absence.
… So if patience is the absence of impatience, perhaps we need to look more at the nature of impatience than the nature of patience. What is it about impatience that seems so hard to get out of?
…when we have an expectation of the speed at which things should be happening (but they are not), is it not our impatience that spurs us on to try to hurry things up and make them happen as fast as we want? …all this hurrying up results in a lot of struggling and pushing ourselves to do things faster, creating a lot of stress and tensing up which results in further mounting ‘feelings’ of impatience.
…We often get impatient because we have not fully appreciated what is involved in the process and all the steps necessary to complete the task. …the wake – up call of impatience alerts us to an essential level of knowledge — knowing what we don’t know. This acknowledgement of our lack of knowledge invites us to open ourselves up willingly to a learning process to gain that knowledge.
…it makes no sense to practise patience, if by patience we mean trying not to be impatient or trying to slow down and calm down.
…After we have learned and our expectations are more in accord with reality, will we end up experiencing something we would call patience ? Or will we simply be living our lives better — without impatience?
As a result of this learning we end up not just perceiving reality more accurately. We actually end up living in a different reality than we did before — one that includes a changed understanding of the meaning of the experience of impatience and how to use it to learn. With this changed und..
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