From Impatience to Patience.
The first memory, that comes to mind, of feeling an overwhelming sense of impatience, was after the first year of post malaria recovery. I had managed to survive cerebral malaria, which nearly took my life. After a few weeks in intensive care, I was discharged to my parents house in New Jersey. My physical and mental health would never be the same.
At home in New Jersey I went through rounds and rounds of illness. It felt as if every other week I was being held down by some sort of flu or bug. Most of my physical systems (digestive, excretory, nervous and endocrine) were compromised and lacked the ability to fight off bugs. Bugs, which many people would not even notice or know they were fighting, but to me they would put me in bed for weeks.
I was twenty years old when I became sick with malaria and even though I had the stuffing knocked out of me, I still had great desire to live. Whenever I started to feel better, I would think about changing my situation from being jobless, penniless and physically compromised, to the dreams I had for my life. No sooner had I begun to dream would I become sick again.
One particular memory of the cycle of frustration with my energy and health, came when a friend invited me to a Phish New Years festival in Florida. I wasn’t a fan of the music or the scene, but I just longed for an experience other than looking at my bedroom wall. I signed up to do a work trade at the event in exchange for getting in for free. My friend was going to drive down to Florida from New Jersey and we would camp out during the festival. A week before the event I became ill, and spent New Years evening lying in my bed feeling thoroughly depressed, thinking about all my peers enjoying themselves, celebrating life.
I remember that moment well because it was the first time I couldn’t seem to beat the sense of frustration that came over me. This was also the beginning of a false sense of reality, a reality in which I thought I could do lots of things, dreaming of adventures while my health however, could not match those dreams. I would often have to find this out the hard way, taking on endeavors that my mind wanted but my body would not sustain.
Over the last twenty years there have been many occasions where events, jobs, opportunities, relationships have closed because of my health. I’ve had to pick myself up, over and over again. Sometimes my body has gone into seizures. I lose consciousness. Witness all my life memories, before being dragged back into this life, this consciousness, unable to see, wondering where I am, gasping for air, in a body stiff from the neurological explosion of the seizure.
These events have shaped who I am today, and caused me to doubt my own abilities, while at the same time I still believe I am the same person I was pre-malaria. Consequently, over the last few years I have undertaken a self prescribed course of evolutionary re-programming to question and check my own perspective, as it became compromised, lacking realistic perspective, driving me to pursue unattainable, possibly dangerous objectives. Self re-programming is a very difficult thing to undertake. Re-training the way you think and look at life is probably one of the hardest things to do in life.
If like me, you have fallen and picked yourself up many times, not necessarily due to bad choices, but because the body and mind decide something other than your own wishes, you start to think that any good run of health will always come to an end, and when it does, depression, frustration and impatience set in.
Over time, with every good run of energy I start to think I better take advantage of those moments, where a possibility for adventure is available, because if I don’t take advantage I will miss the opportunity. A sense of pressure starts to build and with that comes the feeling of impatience. Whether it’s working in the garden, driving a car, having a relationship, there’s an energy to move things forward at pace, to get closer to an ideal, to a concept of what life should be like, and how life should be lived.
This push, this impatience, didn’t arise solely because of my health, but also my lifestyle. For many years I moved a lot. Before I was fifteen I had already immigrated and lived in at least eight houses and changed schools at least four times. Friends to me were temporary, maybe never to be seen again or cultivated. In my love life I would often operate with this history in mind. Most of my relationships over the last decade have been on the road, while traveling or living in a place where I called home for less than a year. I have held a concept that I should be able to meet someone, a female, I may be attracted too, one day and hang out with them the next. Sometimes this has been a reality but I have that sense of impatience, that desire to get straight into something, because of a feeling of lack of time, and this often doesn’t create long lasting friendships.
My deep seated impatience didn’t just stem from malaria, but further back from when I was a child. Growing up in England, before I came to the United States, I was partially deaf. It wasn’t until I came to the United States for an ear operation that I knew I was partially deaf, an operation that revolutionized my life. All of a sudden I could hear all kinds of sounds I had never heard before.
The operation made me realize I was quite happy not being able to hear the noise of the world, especially people’s conversations. The quiet, silent nature of my life was extremely beautiful. I was blissed out as a young boy. I didn’t know what depression meant, I felt a lot of peace, despite whatever was going on around me. I developed a sense, or rather a desire, for telethapy. I don’t mean I could communicate with people without talking, but I wanted too. Talking was a mundane endeavor. Why couldn’t people understand in an instant what I was thinking? Why did I have to waste energy, distracting me from the experience of life, in order to speak? A sliver of impatience and frustration with people and their ways of interacting, crept into my life. My mother used to say talking to me was like, getting blood out of a stone. I kept myself to myself.
The word ‘patient’ comes from the Latin word ‘patientem’, meaning ‘to endure’, but add the prefix ‘im’ and you get impatient, the inability to endure. If I am impatient I must first be patient. Without patience there is no impatience. Both patience and impatience require endurance, whether you have the ability to endure or not endure, in a sense you are enduring something, it could be the non-endurance but an endurance nonetheless. Patience is the quality of being willing to bear adversities, calm endurance of misfortune, and suffering. I certainly have experienced suffering, misfortune and stood up to adversities. I must have had patience to endure these aspects of my life, which struck me as a huge positive. Maybe, I had been viewing my frustration and impatience in the wrong light.
In order to survive great adversity you must have patience, the ability to endure. Impatience on the other hand, could be defined as a 'restlessness under existing conditions’. Impatience is a desire to change the situation, you don’t want to wait. Impatience may exist in order to push you towards another goal, possibly a positive one. Yet, behind the impatience, there is patience. If you are going through great difficulty it’s not impatience that drives you forward to tackle the situation and persevere, it’s patience.
Patience is engrained in every human, without it, we wouldn’t exist. As each breath comes into us we have to wait for the next breath. There’s no rule for how many breath’s we get, we must have patience in order to live, in order to accept the next breath that comes into us.
We may not realize it but we have more patience than impatience. Our ability to endure is engrained in our DNA. To know that I’m not as impatient as I once thought, that there is a deep seated patience dwelling inside me, allowing me to live one breath at a time, has helped me to understand and question that rush, that feeling of pushing. It has shown me, who I am, a being full of endurance - just like you.