This is the day before the most important election of our lifetime. By now, many of us will have voted. By tomorrow, most of us may not know the results of our vote because of the sheer number of people voting and the time it takes to tabulate absentee and mail-in votes. Beyond that, there will undoubtedly be court cases and further delays. So that’s where patience comes in. Patience – the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.
What does it mean to be patient? Can you learn to be patient? There are several types of patience – -there is interpersonal patience, life hardship patience, and daily hassles patience. Waiting for the results of an election might involve all three. There might be people in our lives who are absolutely calm in the face of uncertainty, and that can be both reassuring and annoying to be around. Waiting for election results, however, is probably categorized as “daily hassles” patience — “Sometimes you need patience to deal with circumstances that are beyond your control. These are your “life hassles.” Something as trivial as getting stuck in a traffic line, for instance, or waiting for a computer program to load” …or waiting to find out who was elected! It will be a life hassle to wait for election results.
Since none of us can rush the results of an election, what can we do to avoid being frustrated, anxious or angry? I’m thinking that there might be a lot of walking around the block, texting or calling friends to find out how they are feeling, going to the gym, watching a movie or cooking a favorite dish. It may be hard not to stay glued to the TV to find out the latest opinions and perspectives. TV watching, however, may be the least fruitful of all the patience techniques, since you can be sure that if something actually is resolved, you will receive a call or a text pretty quickly and you won’t have missed anything more than endless hours of talking heads and chalkboards! Be careful to avoid listening to sources and reading tweets that may not be at all accurate. Everyone will have an opinion. There may be few results we can trust for days or even weeks.
Whatever you do to exercise patience, please know that practicing it will increase your empathy, reduce your anxiety, and won’t change a thing other than improving your own mental health! We will eventually know who won the 2020 election. Take a deep breath and pretend to be a Zen monk…for a few days (or weeks) at least! After that, we can go back to being our normally anxious selves!
PATIENCE IS NOT THE ABILITY TO WAIT,
BUT HOW YOU ACT WHILE YOU ARE WAITING