Patience

"Do you have the patience to wait

till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

till the right action arises by itself?"

Tao Te Ching

Often we can find ourselves in situations where life doesn't seem to be moving and we can feel stuck where we are and with what we have. No matter what we do, we simply cannot gain any forward motion and it feels like we are going round in circles. In our frustration, we tell ourselves that we need to do something, anything to get what we want, yet time and again these attempts to manipulate life through some unskillful action only end up causing us more frustration and unhappiness, as we push what we want even farther away.

But what if the key to having what we want and solving all of our problems in the process, is to simply allow all of the madness and struggle in our minds to settle down, take a refreshing breath, and to be patient until the next step is revealed to us naturally? What if the answers we are looking for lie, not in doing something, but in simply waiting until the answers we need can arise from within, in their own way?

What we may find when we live with this kind of patience, is that the right action will always reveal itself at just the right time, and sometimes, we might not have to do anything at all to get what we want. Just the act of waiting with patience will often reveal the next step we need to take to reach our goal, or to accomplish something that we long for. With patience, we also learn to trust that what is happening right now is absolutely the best possible thing that can be happening, and when we live in alignment with the way things are, we find the happiness that is always waiting for us, here and now.