On practicing...

...patience. I was in the shop the other day, queuing patiently to pay for a lottery ticket but with a small sense of urgency about getting back to work to have lunch. There was a blind lady a couple of people in front of me who naturally was taking a bit longer to be 'processed' than one would have liked. So, I did the mindful thing and noticed my own growing impatience and recognised it as being my own and not caused by the blind lady, so I whipped out my smart phone to appease my impatience. Is this really practicing patience? Or is it encouraging distraction? We live in a world with increasing amounts of distraction everywhere, our minds are conditioned to work at high speeds to cope with the fast moving data-obsessed nature of our jobs and the entertainment 'industry'(speaking very generally). Perhaps I should have just stayed with my impatience and questioned it, and analysed it further. My first thought was "this is an opportunity to practice patience", my next thought was "I'll get my phone out", so I don't know who much I really practiced being patient.

Skip forward to this morning, when I was in the shower while my phone alarm was going off. At this point, there was nothing I could do to switch it off, because well, I was in the shower. Shower + Phone = Broken Phone. So, again here was an opportunity to practice patience, a pretty persistent one at that, as is the nature of an alarm. It's very name provokes a sense of immediacy and not something that is easily ignored. At first I could recognise the growing impatience, and I recognised the subsequent 'thought reactions' to it, some of which were a little bit angry; I think the word 'idiot' came to mind but I persevered with it and allowed the alarm to continue and not annoy me until I was able to comfortably ignore it, again by distraction but this time merely by my own idle shower-thoughts!