Patience

Ever been stuck in traffic? Ever look over at the driver next to you and watch him boil with anger? He bangs his steering wheel. He drops megaton f-bombs on everyone and everything in his vicinity. He blares his horn at no one in particular – at the traffic gods perhaps, who wreak havoc and screw with people for no good reason – like teenage boys. He screams over onto the berm and flies past everyone, because where he’s going is far more important than whatever anyone else is doing.

When I commuted into Pittsburgh for work every day, this used to happen to me all the time (by which I mean that the angry driver was next to me, not that I was the angry driver, lol). Since then, I’ve starting thinking of the angry driver phenomenon as evidence that patience is becoming a lost art. It’s losing its power in our society for some reason. And I do think that most people would agree with me. Cooking food in the oven is too long to wait. Waiting until next Thursday to watch part two of a two-part episode of my favorite tv show is too long to wait. We’d rather binge watch.

So let’s use the dictionary definition of patience for now, which I think is pretty good. It’s something like, “The ability to endure discomfort without complaint.” Now of course, there’s a whole range of discomforts, so this is a pretty broad definition, but patience is a pretty big word, so I think the definition will work as a starting point. There’s more to it in my opinion, but I want to write the second half of the definition as we go along.

Ok. So I think patience is an important virtue, and it’s sad to see it sort of slipping away. It’s one of the Fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5. 1 Corinthians 13:4 tells us, “Love is patient.” It’s an incredibly important virtue within Christianity, but even if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, it’s easy to see the importance of patience. Just watch a lion stalking its prey or a bird building a nest. It’s a trait selected by nature. Patience is a virtue in just about every way you look at it, from within almost any framework you can think of.

But I think that patience requires a lot of us, and that’s why it’s becoming an endangered species. If you think about it, patience is connected to a lot of other virtues. Patience is actually a network of virtues all working together to help you navigate successfully through life. Kindness, humility, generosity, self-control/self-discipline, perseverance, empathy. I think you also have to be creative to be patient, because you have to employ the right psychological strategies to endure different kinds of discomfort.

Let’s take our angry guy in traffic. If he was humble enough, he would realize his agenda for the day is no more important than anybody else’s. If he was generous enough, he would be honored to give of his time for those of us who are all just trying to get somewhere. If he had enough self-control, he could just buckle down and willpower his way through. If he had enough empathy, he could see we’re all trying to get somewhere, just like he is, and we’re all coping in different ways, ways that work for us. And even if all these strategies failed him, if he was creative enough, he would find a viable solution to the problem of the traffic. He could listen to music or schedule out his day or think about his family and imagine what they’re doing at that same moment or he could think about the car in front him and imagine it in different colors or different shapes or imagine the lives of the people inside and where they might be going.

But instead of choosing to employ any of those viable strategies available to him, he chooses to revert to the psychological state of a toddler and throw a tantrum. And make no mistake. It is a choice he’s making. He is choosing to unravel decades of learning what it means to be a human. And, well, maybe he didn’t learn what he should have over those decades, but I think those were all choices too – to ignore the lessons he should have been learning in life. So in a way, patience is also a network of the choices you make and the lessons you learn from trying to solve life’s problems. The more experiences you have and the more problems you solve, the more strategies you will have at your disposal to endure discomfort. So ok. Here’s my full definition of patience, “the ability to employ strategies learned from past experiences to endure discomfort in the present.”

In that way, I believe patience is truth. So let me take a minute to explain what I mean by that, because that might seem a bit wonky. I have heard people define truth as something that is consistent with reality. I’m not a big fan of that definition. I just don’t believe that truth is something you can find in reality. I mean, what is reality? I believe we only see glimpses and flashes of it. Reality is an infinite puzzle, and we only see a few pieces at a time. Reality is the thing we are always discovering, so our understanding of it is always incomplete. For us to say that something is consistent with reality we would have to have a complete view of reality, and we do not. Swiss psychologist and philosopher, Jean Piaget, said, "Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality." So he's saying that we never really know reality, we only know the processes that we use to develop our understanding of it. Your reality is different from another person's reality if they use a different process to understand it or if they have different perceptions and experiences from you.

Here’s an example. The Grass is green. Is this true? We believe this statement is consistent with reality, but some people who are color blind might see grass as gray or red. So for those people, “grass is green” is untrue, because it’s not consistent with their reality. If we use this definition of truth, then “grass is green” is both true and not true at the same time, depending on who is looking at it. So reality is slightly different for every observer. What this tells me is that truth isn’t in reality. It’s inside of us. Inside of how we perceive, process, think, and feel.

Here’s another example from a slightly different angle. Gravity. Let’s say 200 years from now, humans discover some new thread in the fabric of reality that changes our perception of how gravity works. We might say, “Gravity is no longer true.” Well, but if truth is something that is consistent with reality, then gravity never was true – we just didn’t know it. Now fast forward 200 more years into the future. We discover a new thread that teaches us that gravity was true all along.

You think this won’t, doesn’t happen. This sort of thing happens all the time. Some new scientific theory is constantly trumping the old one. This scientific study teaches us that drinking one glass of milk a day decreases your risk of a heart attack and the next scientific study shows exactly the opposite. One day, we believe that the first humans arose 200,000 years ago, and then the next day, there’s a discovery that teaches us that humans are closer 300,000 years old. In fact, even our understanding of gravity has changed several times since Newton’s Law. In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein defined a new equation for us to calculate the force of gravity. I’m no physicist, but I understand that Einstein’s theory of relativity had to slightly alter the force of gravity to account for an expanding universe, and through testing, his equation has repeatedly been proven to be more accurate than Newton’s when calculating gravity in the cosmos. And then more recently, our understanding of gravity changed yet again when calculating it’s force between subatomic particles.

Herman Melville said, “Every…human science is a passing fable.” And Piaget said, "Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next." Just like our perception, every scientific study can only account for a limited view of reality…not the whole thing. If we live by this definition of truth (consistent with reality), then we can never really be sure if anything is ever true. And any truth is just a passing fable.

I’m sorry. One last example. Is something that happens in a dream true? To answer that, you would have to ask yourself if a dream is real? What is a dream if it’s not real? I mean, are thoughts real? If not, then you could never say anything truthful about your thoughts or the way you think. Well…and then what about those fragments of a dream that you can’t quite remember? Are they true?

So using that definition has problems. Now, any definition is going to have problems, especially the definition of a word so elusive and profound as truth. I think, the best criteria to establish a good definition is whether or not it is useful. And to say that a truth is consistent with reality doesn’t appear to be totally useful. What if anything does it have to say about how we should live and how we should be navigating through this life?

Anyway, I’ve been working on a different definition – one that I believe is more useful. It isn’t yet fully fleshed out, I don’t think, but I want to share it with you, because I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I don’t think truth has to do with reality. I think truth has more to do with us – how we think, perceive, make decisions, and solve problems. Truth has to be earned through experience, through suffering, and striving to solve problems.

There are two aspects of truth as far as I can tell. There is the truth that we learn from solving problems and the truth that we use to solve our problems. These are the 2 things we do with truth: we learn it from our experiences and we use what we’ve learned to navigate through life. (1) Learned Truth -- the processes, strategies, and lessons we develop while solving problems or making decision or rattling our way through this life. These things are true. We earn them through our experiences. (2) Solution Truth -- We use the totality of all the truths we’ve learned from past experiences to solve our current problems. So truth is the strategies and tools we learn from solving problems, but it is also the tools we use to solve problems.

Truth isn’t just a simple fact, in my humble opinion. Truth is a more abstract thing…like patience, love, or wisdom, things that we develop over time through a network of struggles and trials and errors. Truth is life. Truth is what it means to be human. It’s almost undefinable, really. Truth is the thing that helps you to best navigate through your life, to solve your most important problems, to make your most difficult decisions. And truth is what you’ve learned from the past that can help you solve future problems.

Angry guy in traffic doesn’t have patience, because he didn’t learn the truths that were available to him along the way through life, so he doesn’t have an arsenal of truth at his disposal to endure discomforts. He simply has not built the complex network that it takes to have enough patience to sit in rush-hour traffic.

So fight for every day, because every day is worth it. And fighting for today will make your tomorrow better.