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When I was younger and just beginning my professional career, I remember a colleague whose reputation for uncouthness was, I believe, physically manifested in his hair, which sprang outward in all cardinal and intercardinal directions and had never once been introduced to the teeth of a decent comb.

People would warn new employees that this coworker was perpetually grumpy, but only because they themselves were too kind to use more honest pejoratives. I had seen a number of employees resign after being assigned to this man’s department but was too junior at the time to have any say in his managerial habits. Complaints had been raised, but due to a decades of crystallized knowledge that only existed in his particular brain, as well as a long-standing and somewhat nostalgic relationship with the founder, the curmudgeonly employee persisted in his station even years after I left the organization.

To be clear, this man was not cruel—it’s just that his approach to relationships was not dissimilar to a Chihuahua I once met at a pet shelter. This canine was so aggressively insecure that a permanent diaper had to be placed on it’s backside in order to prevent it from pissing on every prospective owner. The Chihuahua never realized it had been diapered and would scoot around the adoption area with one leg in the air, thinking that it was defending its own honor while really it was just soiling itself.

Over time and after much experience, I learned certain strategies that made interactions with this employee more productive (in other words, I found a diaper). Since he was immensely intelligent and loved to teach, inviting him to share knowledge on a subject, any subject, would keep his more searing vituperations at bay. I gave up on making jokes, realizing that a net positive interaction would always be futile and that if this particular employee had a sense of humor, then it was vastly different from and incomprehensible to my own. I became an expert in avoiding this man’s fragility, dodging every possible trap with bullet time precision.

One day in late Autumn (I remember because the trees outside were dark brown), I sat with this man while proofing the details of some inconsequential promotional material. The bags beneath his eyes were broad and heavy, like the hulls of two large ships keeping his glasses afloat, and the crags around his forehead looked like lightning strikes thundering from his salt-n-pepper crown. His hands were greasy from running them through his hair and you could see subtle staining on his keyboard from the repeated use. He was verbalizing his usual thinly-veiled digs; I was employing all my tactics to avoid them. It sounds tense, but really it was the opposite.

I had worked with him for years by this point, and somewhere along the way I learned to accept him. There was no longer any expectation that he would change and, while his behavior was still generally deplorable, I remember looking at him for the first time with a feeling that can only be described as affection. From somewhere outside of myself, a phrase floated into mind:

“Patience is enjoying the company of undesirable people…”

I’m not quite sure why this lesson chose me on that particular day, but it did. I think that’s just how patience works. You practice it until you become it. One day, the switch just happens. You realize that you are no longer dragging your enthusiasm behind you like a body needing to be buried, but instead show up fully arrived—enthusiasm and willpower perfectly synced. You are no longer just enduring the moment, but actually enjoying it.

This is not to say that mere acceptance is capable of turning pain into pleasure. There are problems in life much graver than a sourpuss coworker. However, it is to say that the rejection of unavoidable challenges is, perhaps, it’s own kind of suffering.

I am convinced that humans are meant to live in reality, not fiction, and all spiritual health is predicated on the condition that we be faithful to the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be. An ounce of delusion costs a gallon of resilience—and rejecting what we know to be true will always be experienced by our spirit as a defeat. This is an inescapable byproduct of conscience.

So when we learn to accept unpleasant realities, our soul maintains the integrity necessary to eventually outgrow our feelings of anguish, although those feelings may be great at the time. When we shun unpleasant realities, we weaken our immunity to their offenses. Patience, then, is the reward of this integrity. It is the reserve strength that comes from feeding on truth rather than fantasy; the ability to possess one’s soul and remain it’s captain despite the end of the world taking place around you.

Perhaps this is why, from the outside, a patient person seems so indifferent to the passage of time or to any lack of visible progress. Patience is already the sum of a million micro-surrenders. It is the muscle-memory of innumerable rehearsals in releasing, embracing, then re-releasing the present. But then, we are getting dangerously close to Kierkegaard’s idea of “repetition,” aren’t we?

In conclusion, I urge you, reader, to shift your thinking on patience from being an ability to endure, and instead as the capacity to remain present in—or even enjoy— the circumstances around you. It need not be a beautiful circumstance, but it is far more pleasant to view a storm from the stillness of it’s eye than from the outskirts. I think you will agree.

Be good,

Bradley Andrews

About the Author:

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that you are guaranteed to love.