During my college admissions season, I was constantly battling a surge of internal anxiety and urgency. While no external force exerted pressure upon me, I was the main source of pressure and expectations that fiddled with my thoughts and emotions. As I progressed through my freshman year in college during a pandemic, far more situations arose that tested me from different angles. I walked through these journeys and learned one main lesson: the value of patience.
Before I faced these tests, patience was a mere concept to me. I thought patience is simply about controlling one’s own emotions to calm anger and frustration directed at oneself or others. I realized this year, however, that there is a much deeper wisdom embedded into the practice of patience that one can only discover through obstacles—when all you can do is wait.
Through Starry Scholar’s Mending Minds feature, I hope one truth I can share is that practicing patience is also a productive method of dealing with conflict. Too often I believed that in the face of trouble, it’s only right for me to get up and frantically run around for ways to solve the problem. Sometimes, time-sensitive actions must take place to resolve problems. Other times, it seems that all you can do is wait but rather the reality is...all you need to do is wait.
If you’re at all like me, suspense and silence can be difficult to handle. Especially when you’ve done everything you can and yet you still feel like life isn’t unravelling the way you expected or planned; you feel helpless. That’s where patience dominates the battle ground. Patience is powerful. Patience empowers you with endurance, stamina, and resilience. Yes, your mind may be on the brink of bursting with all kinds of concerns, imaginations of worst-case scenarios, and confusion. Nonetheless, knowing how to turn off this whirlwind in our minds to breathe in and out and trust that everything indeed will be okay is a skill we must learn.
As a reminder, I don’t mean to tell you to just wait and lie down amidst trouble because everything’s going to work out anyway. The point is that as you approach overwhelming challenges and attempt to find solutions, once you realize you’ve done your best and the outcome is not in your hands, patience is dire to keep your mind and body healthy. Seek patience. Seek patience with the situation, the environment, your community, and most importantly yourself.
It’s often so easy to think, “Nothing goes the way I want it to.”
Yes, we don’t control what happens everyday. Many times life may not go the way we hoped for, but what makes us assume that what we desired was the best outcome that could happen after all? We need to expand our minds and think about the big picture at times. What we think is the perfect outcome now may not be the best outcome that molds us into a wiser, more experienced being in the years to come. To transcend our temporary and narrow vision and see the greater event of things, we again need to incorporate patience and introspection into our daily lives.
I know we’re met by chaotic conflicts from time to time (or even full blown series of conflicts sometimes). The journey through these mountains will be tough, but we’ll learn lessons we’ve never acquired before. That lesson for me was patience. Of course, I’m still on a gradual progression of maturing into a more patient person, myself, but I hope that the perspective I shared above will serve to remind you that patience indeed is also a productive method of overcoming your obstacles.
We hope you enjoyed this article. For more content on how to find your academic success, check out some of our articles here on Starry Scholar. If you have any questions/comments, feel free to leave them in our “Community Discussion” tab, or email us at @[email protected]! Remember, you got this ☆
Through Starry Scholar’s Mending Minds feature, I hope one truth I can share is that practicing patience is also a productive method of dealing with conflict. Too often I believed that in the face of trouble, it’s only right for me to get up and frantically run around for ways to solve the problem. Sometimes, time-sensitive actions must take place to resolve problems. Other times, it seems that all you can do is wait but rather the reality is...all you need to do is wait.
If you’re at all like me, suspense and silence can be difficult to handle. Especially when you’ve done everything you can and yet you still feel like life isn’t unravelling the way you expected or planned; you feel helpless. That’s where patience dominates the battle ground. Patience is powerful. Patience empowers you with endurance, stamina, and resilience. Yes, your mind may be on the brink of bursting with all kinds of concerns, imaginations of worst-case scenarios, and confusion. Nonetheless, knowing how to turn off this whirlwind in our minds to breathe in and out and trust that everything indeed will be okay is a skill we must learn.
As a reminder, I don’t mean to tell you to just wait and lie down amidst trouble because everything’s going to work out anyway. The point is that as you approach overwhelming challenges and attempt to find solutions, once you realize you’ve done your best and the outcome is not in your hands, patience is dire to keep your mind and body healthy. Seek patience. Seek patience with the situation, the environment, your community, and most importantly yourself.
It’s often so easy to think, “Nothing goes the way I want it to.”
Yes, we don’t control what happens everyday. Many times life may not go the way we hoped for, but what makes us assume that what we desired was the best outcome that could happen after all? We need to expand our minds and think about the big picture at times. What we think is the perfect outcome now may not be the best outcome that molds us into a wiser, more experienced being in the years to come. To transcend our temporary and narrow vision and see the greater event of things, we again need to incorporate patience and introspection into our daily lives.
I know we’re met by chaotic conflicts from time to time (or even full blown series of conflicts sometimes). The journey through these mountains will be tough, but we’ll learn lessons we’ve never acquired before. That lesson for me was patience. Of course, I’m still on a gradual progression of maturing into a more patient person, myself, but I hope that the perspective I shared above will serve to remind you that patience indeed is also a productive method of overcoming your obstacles.
We hope you enjoyed this article. For more content on how to find your academic success, check out some of our articles here on Starry Scholar. If you have any questions/comments, feel free to leave them in our “Community Discussion” tab, or email us at @[email protected]! Remember, you got this ☆