What place does patience have in a busy world? And in a busy profession? Do lawyers even have time for patience?
Maybe, if we think about patience differently.
Patience, not as in waiting for your associate to complete a project or your assistant to return from vacation, but patience as in turning towards anger, frustration, dismay.
Patience, not in the sense of waiting at all, but in the sense of of walking right through the fire.
Even in an ordinary moment: patience gives us the ability to be there, and learn. It's challenging, for me. But it’s such an alive path to choose.
What place does patience have in a busy world? And in a busy profession? Do lawyers even have time for patience?
Maybe, if we think about patience differently.
Patience, not as in waiting for your associate to complete a project or your assistant to return from vacation, but patience as in turning towards anger, frustration, dismay.
Patience, not in the sense of waiting at all, but in the sense of of walking right through the fire.
Even in an ordinary moment: patience gives us the ability to be there, and learn. It's challenging, for me. But it’s such an alive path to choose.
Wake Up Call #368: Patience in an Impatient World.
Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 368. Today I want to talk about patience, the third paramita, also called k’shanti-paramita.
“Patience” is not the only translation of k’shanti. If we think of k’shanti as being late and waiting for someone to get ready, or waiting for a traffic light to change, we’re just looking at the tippy top of the iceberg. It also translates as forbearance and tolerance; the be unaffected by, able to bear, or able to understand.
How would that even work in today’s world – a world that feels profoundly impatient? And if anything, the law is even more impatient. Clients want things now, so we have a 24/7 work culture. Partners and senior associates want junior lawyers and staff to finish whatever stands between them and the work they want done, so junior lawyers work as fast and hard as they can. Even at home, sometimes I find myself expecting everyone to look up, answer, be ready, get things done, at a rapid clip. So much of American culture, anyway, is about efficiency…which in some ways of looking at it, is nothing more than impatience. If I can get things done more efficiently, I don’t have to be patient at all.
K’shanti-paramita is about being more patient in those situations, for sure. But on a deeper level, patience is about bearing the hard and difficult parts of being human. It’s not about not fighting for justice or letting yourself be walked on, but it is about seeing that no matter how hard we work, and how passionately we advocate, we’ll never get everything done, and so, we can relax a little.
What k’shanti invites us to do is to see that patience and tolerance are what we need in order to walk honestly and passionately straight into the fire of life. To slowly and fiercely and with abundant dedication, as a Boddhisatva, slice through delusion and do the work we do and obtain justice, or at least reach a less unjust place. To create, probably not a completely just world in our own lifetimes, but a moment, or a space, that’s a little more safe, a little more sacred.
According to Norman Fischer, “the perfection of patience is transformative. It transforms difficult circumstances from misfortunes or disasters into spiritual benefit. For this reason it is a particularly powerful practice, and prized and essential one. A person who develops it has strength of character, vision, courage, dignity, and depsty. He, she, or they understand something profound about human beings and how to love them.”
A ringing endorsement if ever there was one.
So to be clear, k’shanti-paramita is not the perfection of whipiness, the perfection of being a wallflower. Nor is it the perfection of spiritual bypass, where we say, it’s all good, I’m good, everything is just passing through, nothing to do. The practice of “nothing to do” has its place but not here.
Asking the question, how do we move towards the perfection of patience, we could be asking, “How can I pose fewer objections to the difficulties of life?”
The First Noble Truth of mindfulness, which is the truth of suffering – sometimes people think it’s a depressing way to think about life. But the profound contribution of Buddhism and mindfulness to the world is the insight that no matter how privileged we are, by gender, ethnicity, good health, being born with a sense of ease; by wealth, education, intelligence; no matter how privileged we are, we will still encounter disappointment. We’ll lose cases, upset people, be railed at by opposing counsel, be disparaged by a colleague, lose clients, fail. We’ll get sick. We’ll lose people we love. We’ll age. And even if we’re fortunate enough to age slowly and in good health, at some point we’ll face our own death. We can’t avoid these things because they’re what defines the human condition.
That’s the First Noble Truth. The Second Noble Truth says, yes, it’s true that suffering is part of the human condition. AND, we can suffer a whole lot less if we stop wishing things were other than they are. Stop wanting everything to be fine, or stay fine; and stop turning away or pushing away from things, people, situations, that are painful, or that we don’t want, or didn’t ask for. And instead, turn towards the difficulties we encounter, and let them be our teachers.
The impossible opposing counsel: what can we learn about our own reactivity, our frail ego, our intensely competitive nature? The traffic, and we’re late for a meeting: what can we learn about how fast we want to move through our life, our desire for control, our exhaustion? What can we learn about our own vulnerability, our fear?
To learn any of those things; to be able to turn towards the small, everyday difficulties of life and the big ones, and place ourselves in a position to learn, we need patience, tolerance, forbearance. K’shanti. Mindfulness notices: here’s a moment I didn’t plan on. Didn’t ask for. Didn’t want. K’shanti reminds me: I can be here. Sure, I can be on a beach, I can be in my nice office; in my house with my partner, my dog; my TV. But if I’m going to really live life and become fully useful to others, a truly great lawyer and human, then “here” is where it’s at. And being “here” requires patience – the patience to learn about myself, here, in this moment, from this moment. Learn maybe from my initial response (or reaction) to turn away, complain, blame; instead of be with, here, where there are lifetimes of lessons to learn.
Norman Fischer says, k’shanti also reminds us that it’s not just us. Other people are in the crosshairs, are sick, are stuck in terrible traffic. Which changes the inquiry from, “Why me?,” to, “I guess we’re all in this together.” He says, “when suffering is ‘ours’ instead of ‘mine,’ it’s not suffering. My sorrow, grief, or fear is painful, yet it’s also sweet, because I share it with everyone. This is how the Boddhisatva understands the Third Noble Truth…., ‘the end of suffering’. ….[Not] the end of physical pain, failure, loss, alienation, fear, and other forms of suffering, but rather the transformation of suffering into solidarity and love.”
Let’s sit.
[Play the John Lennon Imagine video at the end of the Paramitas – whenever that is! (It’s bookmarked under Music.)]
What place does patience have in such a busy world?
And such a busy profession? Do lawyers have time for patience?
Yes, if we think about patience differently.
Patience not in the sense of hanging back, but of walking through.
Patience not as in waiting,
but as in turning towards our lives and truly feeling whatever is going on.
Whether that’s fire, flood, famine, or an ordinary, intense, moment,
patience is what allows us to be with it and learn from it.
Sound challenging? I think so.
But it’s also such an alive path to choose.