How long does it take and what is patience?
blazingstar
Citizen
in General ASD
Looking back on my life and having read autism posts for four years now, I am considering more deeply how very long it takes to make significant changes in one's life.
I can remember trying something one or twice...or even a week or two...and then saying, "Well, that doesn't work!"
Or I can try something for a period of time which seems to work and then one day it doesn't and I give up in disgust.
There are certainly things that don't work. But many take much longer than we think to achieve noticeable differences in our lives. Years. Maybe even decades.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, I participated in a 12 step program. One of the emphases was on gratitude. At the time, I barely thought of being thankful for anything in my life. One could even say I complained and whined a lot.
In my 40s, I began to realize the importance of gratitude and meditation from a number of sources, but what comes to mind are the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. Interestingly enough, the first book of his, that practically jumped off the store bookshelf and into my arms what his book on Anger.
Oh, my! I hadn't even realized how angry I was. Most of the time!
Being grateful, for everything, has so improved the quality of my life. But it has only been the past couple of decades that gratitude has come to fill my life with its blessings.
In retrospect, I can see how my younger self would have scoffed at the idea of being grateful for so much. Yet even then, I had much to be grateful for.
So I am wondering if anyone else has seen where continuous practice over years has resulted in improvements in your own lives, Were you able to be patient? (In general, I am not patient at all!) What does patience mean to you?
How long are you willing to work on a new skill before giving up?
I can remember trying something one or twice...or even a week or two...and then saying, "Well, that doesn't work!"
Or I can try something for a period of time which seems to work and then one day it doesn't and I give up in disgust.
There are certainly things that don't work. But many take much longer than we think to achieve noticeable differences in our lives. Years. Maybe even decades.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, I participated in a 12 step program. One of the emphases was on gratitude. At the time, I barely thought of being thankful for anything in my life. One could even say I complained and whined a lot.
In my 40s, I began to realize the importance of gratitude and meditation from a number of sources, but what comes to mind are the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. Interestingly enough, the first book of his, that practically jumped off the store bookshelf and into my arms what his book on Anger.
Oh, my! I hadn't even realized how angry I was. Most of the time!
Being grateful, for everything, has so improved the quality of my life. But it has only been the past couple of decades that gratitude has come to fill my life with its blessings.
In retrospect, I can see how my younger self would have scoffed at the idea of being grateful for so much. Yet even then, I had much to be grateful for.
So I am wondering if anyone else has seen where continuous practice over years has resulted in improvements in your own lives, Were you able to be patient? (In general, I am not patient at all!) What does patience mean to you?
How long are you willing to work on a new skill before giving up?
Comments
Would this constitute patience?
Works for me
And while I'm not necessarily that good at expressing gratitude, my wife sometimes teases me about being a "covert optimist", as I deliberately cultivated looking at things from as many perspectives as possible, which helps me see the "silver lining" where others might not - but I consider this to make me a realist.
I don't shy away from the horrible aspects of life, I think we have a duty not to close our eyes to them, but I make very deliberate efforts of giving enough attention to the good things in my life, especially when I'm struggling.
That being said, I think "positive thinking" as it's usually (mis)represented in the West is a very shallow concept, often used in detrimental ways.
Now I'm rambling... so to answer your question, it depends: if something is very important to me, I turn it into a life-long project. With more minor things, I give it what I consider a fair chance and try to be at least decently good at something, but I also had to learn that I can't become really good at some things: like drawing for instance
I have noticed that I don't just think things I'm trying to learn aren't going to "work out" for me if I don't pick them up/change how I go about them fast enough, depression honestly is the main barrier that seems to mess with my motivation. It makes me quite pessimistic about achieving things.
Whenever I get depressed and can't keep up with doing the things I was trying to learn I get very upset, as it's hard to get motivated to do those things again. I guess in a way I do feel like I've "failed" or that things won't "work out" because I let depression stop me from doing things I want to do.
I can be so impatient that I will rip off the label of a new garment rather than wait 2 seconds to find the scissors in the drawer, and make a hole in a new shirt. I cannot wait long for people to finish speaking, I will interrupt them rather rudely, ADD is the culprit I believe, the impulsivity makes me so impatient that I cannot read lengthy texts unless I am highly motivated. I translate Kabbalah texts from Hebrew into English for hours which indicates to me that it is all about motivation because I don't have the patience to even begin reading a bank statement or anything I hate and find difficult.
Those traits have certainly been true of myself at one time or another. And yet we can also draw on our autistic strengths to exercise patience, or what passes for it. Our perseverance and concentration, logic and intelligence among them. I have learned languages and sewn patchwork quilts by hand from thousands of pieces. My NT partner marvelled at my 'patience', but in truth the repetition, structure and order all suited my autistic abilities.
Thank you for this affirmative post, @blazingstar: your honest, wise and kindly words seem to me to be pertinent to many threads on this forum. Patience may be difficult for us, but I do believe that if we can overcome our low tolerance for frustration, we can achieve real feats of application.