Patience Is A Sign Of Strength
Patience is a virtue. When things are falling apart, holding yourself together requires immense courage. Immense strength. Immense fortitude. And your patience is tested. You want to lash out. At the injustice. At the unfairness. At the moral depravity. For making you helpless. You want to settle the score. You want to restore the order where you are on top.
And when you do none of those things and hold your patience, it feels like a superpower. People who can hold themselves when holding themselves is hardest are stronger than those who cannot. Patience is not weakness. People mistake it for weakness because they think strength lies in reacting. Sometimes, not reacting takes far more strength.
The person who hurts others when he is hurt knows nothing about pain. He has merely transferred it to someone else. He felt angry and he offloaded that anger onto others. His family. His kids. His friends. His subordinates. What does he know about anger? He has never held it within. He has never processed it.
Ask the person who has been containing that anger inside. Who has been practising restraint when it grows harder. Especially when it grows harder. He knows exactly what anger does. How it feels inside. Where it burns. How much it burns. He knows what it is like to resist the temptation to make someone taste their own medicine.
In all those moments, patience is a virtue. Because things do get better. If not outright better, at least your perspective shifts. The rage subsides. You begin to see things more clearly. With coldness. And from coldness, ruthlessness emerges. You execute your plans far better. Anger always leads to regret. Post-hoc rationalisation can be used to justify that anger, but there is always a better way.
Patience is not only useful in anger. Sometimes you are demotivated. Feeling low. Wanting to quit after years of effort. With no results. And loads of failure. On those days you need patience. To hold on for one more day. To try one more time. It is those days that define you. That transform you. That reshape your life's trajectory.
If you can survive the days when survival itself feels like a challenge, you will likely make it out. You will certainly succeed. Sometimes the difference between failure and success is that one more attempt. And for that you need patience.
You need that story in your head that steadies your mind. You need to remind yourself that there is no glory in lashing out. No glory in giving up. No glory in losing your mind. And while patience sounds unremarkable, sometimes it is the only thing that separates the wheat from the chaff. So hang in there. There is no shame in holding back.