HERE IS SOMETHING TO PONDER FOR THIS LESSON
PATIENCE
If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear. Pooh’s Little Instruction Book.
Impatience has the quality of aversion (anger).It is a reaction to a situation that we don’t like. We want the situation to be otherwise (quicker, more efficient, or just wanting it to end). There is sense contact that gives rise to an unpleasant feeling that leads to our reaction of aversion (due to previous ideas about how things “should be”.)
The following are contemplations/exercises regarding Patience:
• When did you last employ the power of patience? What were the circumstances? How did it feel? What helped you to act patiently? What happened as a result?
• When was the last time someone was very patient with you? How did he or she treat you? How did it feel? What were you able to do or learn as a consequence?
• Whenever you feel impatient, ask yourself if this situation will matter in one minute, one hour, one day, one week, one month, one year, or at the time of your death.
• Often impatience arises because we feel our time is being wasted. This simple exercise allows us to monitor exactly how much time is “wasted” during our impatient period. As soon as you notice impatience arising look at a clock or your watch and note the time (as inconspicuously as possible). Then continue to monitor the amount of time that is consumed during this “wasted” time. Is it a significant amount of time? Did this amount of “wasted” time affect your day?
• Impatience has to do with the ideas of wasting time, inconvenience, deserving special treatment, and the illusion of control. Take time to reflect on this statement and note which of these mental attributes arise each time you feel impatience. Aren’t these ideas due to an automatic habitual response to a situation? What if we could disconnect the habitual reactive response (impatience) from the unpleasant situation? This is the role of mindfulness.
August 7, 2009, 9:25 pm NY Times excerpt
For the Time Being
By Norman Fischer: to really live is to accept that you live “for the time being,” and to fully enter that moment of time. Living is that, not building up an identity or a set of accomplishments or relationships, though of course we do that too. But primarily, fundamentally, to live is to embrace each moment as if it were the first, last, and all moments of time. Whether you like this moment or not is not the point: in fact liking it or not liking it, being willing or unwilling to accept it, depending on whether or not you like it, is to sit on the fence of your life, waiting to decide whether or not to live, and so never actually living. I find it impressive how thoroughly normal it is be so tentative about the time of our lives, or so asleep within it, that we miss it entirely. Most of us don’t know what it actually feels like to be alive. We know about our problems, our desires, our goals and accomplishments, but we don’t know much about our lives. It generally takes a huge event, the equivalent or a birth or a death, to wake up our sense of living this moment we are given – this moment that is just for the time being, because it passes even as it arrives. Meditation is feeling the feeling of being alive for the time being. Life is more poignant than we know.
Dogen writes, “For the time being the highest peak, for the time being the deepest ocean; for the time being a crazy mind, for the time being a Buddha body; for the time being a Zen Master, for the time being an ordinary person; for the time being earth and sky… Since there is nothing but this moment, ‘for the time being’ is all the time there is.”
We want enjoyment, we want to avoid pain and discomfort. But it is impossible that things will always work out, impossible to avoid pain and discomfort. So to be happy, with a happiness that doesn’t blow away with every wind, we need to be able to make use of what happens to us — all of it — whether we find ourselves at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea.
