Out of all the paramitas, patience has been the hardest one for me.
I’ll go much deeper into what the paramitas are in future posts — they are a set of Buddhist principles for living with wisdom and compassion, and each one deserves its own conversation. But for now, this is where I begin. And if I’m honest, this is still where the vast majority of my own inner work continues.
I am historically an impatient person.
Where Impatience Actually Comes From
I remember my dad being this way too. Whenever we traveled, there was always an agenda. We had to be on time. We had to stay on schedule. Deviations weren’t just inconvenient — they created a kind of low-grade tension that followed us through the whole day.
I imagine you know that feeling.
Because when things don’t go according to plan — especially when other people and their relationship with time are involved — what does that create? Stress. Anxiety. A tightening in the chest that has nothing to do with the actual situation and everything to do with the story we carry about what should be happening right now.
Patience and time are inseparable. When we feel short on time, we will almost always feel short on patience too.
The Surprising History of the Clock
So let’s talk about time — this strange, elusive thing we’ve organized our entire lives around.
Here’s something worth knowing: the standardized clock as we experience it today is a surprisingly recent invention. For most of human history, time was local and approximate — tracked by the position of the sun, the rhythm of church bells, or the turning of the seasons. Two towns thirty miles apart might operate on entirely different schedules, and no one found that particularly troubling.
It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that standardized time became a practical necessity — and the reason was almost purely industrial. The expansion of railways across Europe and America made local time variations a logistical nightmare. Trains needed coordinated schedules. And so, for the first time in human history, time was synchronized across vast distances — not for the benefit of human wellbeing, but for the movement of goods and people at scale.
Greenwich Mean Time was established in 1847. Global time zones were formally adopted in 1884. The mechanical clock — once a marvel of medieval monasteries designed to call monks to prayer — became the organizing principle of modern life.
We didn’t create the clock to serve ourselves. We created it to serve productivity.
And we’ve been serving it ever since.
What Productivity Culture Has Quietly Done to Us
In American culture — and increasingly across the world — productivity has become synonymous with worth. Busyness is worn as a badge. Rest is something you earn after everything else is done, which means it rarely arrives at all.
There’s an old saying that no one on their deathbed wishes they had worked more. We all know this. We nod when we hear it. And then we open our laptops.
The modern productivity framework has done something quietly insidious: it has convinced us that more output equals more value. That slowing down is falling behind. That rest is laziness.
But if constantly feeling short on time, rushing through life, and rarely stopping to breathe feels genuinely awful — and most of us will admit that it does — then something in that framework isn’t working.
Patience and Rest as Spiritual Practice — A Different Way
This is where patience and rest as spiritual practice offer something radical.
We do live in a world of appointments and commitments and flights to catch. I’m not suggesting we abandon all of it. But what if we could hold the structure more loosely?
What if you kept the appointments and released the grip on everything in between?
What if rest wasn’t something you scheduled at the end of a long to-do list, but something you protected with the same seriousness as any other commitment?
The Buddhist teaching on patience isn’t asking us to become passive or indifferent to life. It’s asking us to stop fighting the present moment — to stop treating now as an obstacle between us and wherever we think we need to be.
Approaching patience and rest as spiritual practice means recognizing that the capacity to slow down, to wait without tension, to be present without agenda — these aren’t signs of falling behind. They are signs of waking up.
Rest lives in that space. And so does everything else worth having.
Questions to Sit With This Week
Where in your life are you most impatient? And what is that impatience protecting?
What would it feel like to give yourself one unscheduled hour this week — with no agenda at all?
And what might become possible if you treated rest not as a reward, but as a practice?
With warmth — from wherever I am right now, embracing and reflecting on rest and patience.
