Growing in Patience – Mastering the Mind

“You must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.”

~Leonardo da Vinci.

Laughing at the confounding frustration perhaps is the final frontier, here, that the genius inventor is talking about.

Can we for a moment see that ‘flipped’ world?—it’s laughing at those things that ordinarily drive us mad.

Praying for patience has a flipside about it that’s almost unfair... we can always expect opportunities that test our patience in order that we indeed grow in patience.

Surrender, Truly

But growing in patience is not about trying harder to be patient.

It’s about letting the problems, frustrations, common annoyances and extra-grace-required people sweep over our bows; it’s surrendering to the nature of nuisance.

We will never be rid of nuisances. Nuisances—both little and large—are not that important.

As my parents used to say jokingly, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Practicing patience is overrated when we consider how much effort needs to go in; and only then we find one time in twenty we do blow our lid and the other nineteen times we did succeed then seem for nothing. We’re always set to fail, not succeed.

We don’t grow in patience overnight.

But we can choose to surrender to the impulse to control everything or anything. Great wrongs will occur to us and the others close to us. They’ll happen in this world of ours. Getting emotional and angry about them does no one any good.

We can readily see here how critically important the mode of surrender is in the mastery of the mind—and this toward the mastery of life. For when we’re no longer consumed by many a strangling vexation, we’re cognitively and emotionally free to think and feel the thoughts and feelings of God.

The destiny of the Divine is what stands there to be received by all of us.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.