Patience, Perseverance, and Power. Why Did the Stoics See Temperance as a Virtue?
âPatience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is âtimingâ. It waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way.â
â Fulton J. Sheen
Introduction
When I was a little boy, I was taught that patience is a virtue, that I have to wait for good things to happen and they WILL happen. Later on in life, I realized that this is not always the case. Things donât just âhappenâ, you have to âmake them happen.â Or so I began to think⌠Still, in reality, things are never that black and white. Now, looking at it retrospectively, I see that patience doesnât have to be something separate from action, nor is action altogether different from patience. There are times when you have to be still and times when you have to act; times to expand and times to contract. Every person that has ever practiced martial arts knows that.
âWhen the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And, when there is an opportunity, I do not hit â it hits all by itself.â â wrote Bruce Lee
Unfortunately, patience is not always a virtue to be encouraged in adults. Yes, it might be important for children, but does it have to be taken seriously by grown-ups as well? Shouldnât we just âget out there and get itâ? Push, push, push! But how long can you push? What helps you to move forward when you are drained, exhausted, and ready to drop dead? Ahh⌠Patience. Perseverance. Diligence. No wonder the four Stoic virtues are: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. All of them are necessary for one to live a virtuous life even when the going gets tough. Similarly, when the work of the day has been done a wise person knows that he has to recover and get ready for the day ahead. As written by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
âFinish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.â
For some, just like me, going to bed before midnight is harder than waking up early as the first rays of light start piercing the windows. There is your family, your loved one, your roommates, or any other number of distractions that keeps you from putting your head on the pillow early at night. Still, the stoics recommend waking up early, and for good reasons. For many, it is the quietest, most creative, and most productive part of the day. Should we waste it all away just because we donât have the necessary self-discipline for adequate bed-timing? Certainly not! Do we mess up our schedule more often than we would like to? Well, thatâs for everyone to judge for themselves individually and independently.
Patience, temperance, perseverance.
Anyone who has ever made and failed to stick to a plan knows that things donât always go our way. We had decided on something, yet the circumstances changed. We were going in one direction, yet we ended up somewhere else altogether. No wonder the Yiddish have a proverb:
âWhen man plans, God laughs.â
Still, not many of us can live without having a plan. We have to summarize what we did yesterday, what we are going to do today, and what is required from us for tomorrow. Still, planning is not entirely equivalent to carrying out our plans. While the first calms our minds, the second put our thoughts into motion. Planning is often less difficult than doing the thing itself, especially if we are amped with various positive emotions and motivating thoughts. âFrom now on I will get up at 5 every morningâ or âWho needs dinner? Iâll intermittent fast from 5 to 9 with easeâ seem like plausible and worthwhile endeavors, but what often gets in our way is nothing else, but reality itself.
The real, visceral experience of carrying out our intentions is rarely the same as we had expected it to be. Sometimes the reality of the moment is surprisingly more uplifting than we first anticipated, sometimes it is the total opposite. So, if that is the case, what should one do when his or her positive emotions are no longer there to sustain him? What keeps one going after the head start has long left the sights of his or her rearview mirrors? Yep, youâve guessed it. It is patience, temperance, and perseverance.
According to the ancient Greeks, being intelligent and acting accordingly are not two separate things. As captured in the words of the great Athenian philosopher Socrates:
âThere is no difference between knowledge and temperance; for he who knows what is good and embraces it, who knows what is bad and avoids it, is learned and temperate.â
When âfeeling goodâ is no longer there to motivate and guide our actions, it is time to remember and reevaluate why we have begun the task in the first place. What were our intentions, our hopes, our desires? Was it something born out of childish whim, or was it something actually worthwhile and worth the effort? When a burdensome task begins to strangle us it is wise to go back to the very start and revisit the primary thought or motivation of why we have started on this road in the first place. Without legitimizing your actions to yourself clearly and forthrightly you will succumb to the danger of falling flat in front of the first obstacles that youâll encounter. Fortunately, as mentioned both by psychologist Viktor Frankly and his predecessor, the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:
âHe who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.â
Thus, a constant reminder of âwhyâ we are doing this will not just keep us going but will also aid in finding new ways of âhowâ to do it better. When the old methods are no longer working it is time to open our eyes and look for new streams to lead us through the valleys of our intentions and the necessities of existence.
Power
Power is often viewed as a word stained with manipulativeness and dirt. When cloaked this way what often becomes missed is the fact that all of us need at least some degree of power in our lives in order to live both peacefully and sanely. Imagine for a second that you are absolutely powerless. You cannot influence the perceptions of other people and your place in the work world is fully determined by outside forces. You canât even guide your own thoughts, emotions, or actions. What happens then? Well, first, your ego becomes overpowered by its own psychic energies. Second, other people push you around, stepping all over you as they wish. Third, you cannot change that. Is that a good scenario? What is going to happen when you will end up in a situation in which you will have to stand up for yourself or other people? Are you going to deter injustice aimed at you or your loved ones? In his book, 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene writes:
âTo succeed in the game of power, you have to master your emotions. But even if you succeed in gaining such self-control, you can never control the temperamental dispositions of those around you. And this presents a great danger.â
Tempering your emotions can go a long way, especially when addressing oneâs own subjective, internal domain, the psyche. Without having self-control we can become our own worst enemies. To limit that, understanding the inseparability of wisdom and temperance is a must. Still, unfortunately, sometimes the problem does not simply rest within us. Rather, it is to be found in how we relate to the external world of phenomena itself. How we relate to ourselves is crucial, but how we relate to others is no less important. Choosing the wrong key for the right lock is not wisdom. Instead, it shows oneâs insensibility and absentmindedness. A disorganized and imbalanced way of relating to the external teaches us that we have to either rethink and reevaluate our approaches or even better â reobserve the situation that troubles us all together. As concluded by novelist Paulo Coelho:
âWhy is patience so important?â
âBecause it makes us pay attention.â
Paying attention and being patient are two ways of aiming at the same thing. Both of them allude to the necessity for calm, insightful, and deep observation into the nature of what is being presented to the psyche at any given moment or situation. It gives us power not just over our perceptions, but over our awareness itself. What we look at is what we get, yet we canât see everything all at once. Instead, we can pay deep, unwavering attention to what is right in front of us and learn how to conduct ourselves appropriately in accordance with the flux of the situation. That is the power of patience and adaptability. As once saud by Benjamin Franklin:
âHe that can have patience can have what he will.â
Easier said than done, right? Both the direction and outcome of events are rarely clear when approached for the first time. The path is often misty or even worse â hidden from plain sight. When the forest is dark, and the branches are full of spikes what is left to do is to⌠Youâve guessed it! Relax, be patient, and observe. Patient observation is an antidote to most of our lifeâs problems and sufferings. When we observe patiently, things that we havenât seen previously start bubbling into the sphere of our attention. Even though they are not always pleasant to see, nor are they easily solvable, at least we get a chance to glimpse something that would have otherwise remained hidden. As so eloquently put by Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet.
âHave patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.â
All in allâŚ
There is great power in patience, just as there is strength in perseverance. Neither of them can function fully independently, just as wisdom cannot be separated from temperance. That is why we should attempt to be patient when times are rough and temperate when they are good. Then we will not lose the power of attention, nor the dignity of awareness. When we know how to observe, the whole world opens instead of laying hidden under the weight of our former presuppositions, conclusions, and summaries. Life is an ongoing process, not a sterile remembrance. For that reason, our eyes and minds should always remain open, while our bodies â temperate, yet yielding. When the situation changes we change, when the events tilt, we tilt. As the old folk saying goes: the bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists. Unfortunately, we are neither bamboos nor oaks. For this reason, we should determine when to bend, and know when to resist. That can be done by tempering our minds and bodies, observing patiently, and acting accordingly.
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