2022-03-20 Patience with Yourself

We’ve all had moments with a lack of patience or heard the cliche — “patience is a virtue.” And it’s been said that we often overestimate what we can accomplish in three months and drastically underestimate what we can achieve in three years.

The poet Ranier Maria Rilke suggested we become comfortable with uncertainty and have patience with life’s questions. He wrote in Letters to a Young Poet,

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers.

According to Rilke, we must have patience with ourselves as well. “To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree.” Life will come regardless. But only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and patient.

For the overly self-critical, patience with ourselves is a difficult task. The theologian St. Francis de Sales provided sage advice here,

Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You are a perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist.