Patience to endure...

Through difficult times, a man with patience can calmly sail through rough waters. Patience is the hardest skill to master as once said by Conor McGregor. Patience is a virtue and there’s a reason it’s a tough skill to master.

Imagine having spent time in completing your project, through sleepless nights only for it to be rejected. What do you do? The answer, have patience.

My patience was tested most recently. It was that time of the month, when the hypermarket is calling, and the fridge is asking to be filled.

The wife knows it’s the salary day, the list is ready, my wallet is ready to take a hit.

Thinking to myself, since when shopping becomes hard, I mean not the sense of shopping, the process I enjoy. But what spoils it is when I look at the price of each item being added to the trolley.

I patiently proceed to the counter to pay, and my wife quietly wonders so her eyes don’t see the final bill. We said this is expensive, even buying basic needs makes you think twice, we’ve become selective in what we buy.

Ramadhan is just few weeks away and in my mind we would save a little, but that will be short-lived, the fact that Eid is just round the corner.

We have to be grateful for what we have, appreciate that we can afford basic needs.

But the way we felt that our salaries are only good for the first two weeks, then we have to survive until our next salary. My wife keeps reminding me, that we can’t just live every month paycheck to paycheck.

I agree, but we have tired finding other sources of income, but failed, nothing ever worked.

I said to her that I lost hope and no longer have the patience to bear anymore failures.

That’s when she said, abandon it or endure while the latter requires dedication and belief in yourself and hard work, more importantly it requires patience to withstand the onslaughts of rejections and heartaches to push through the seas of dead hopes and finally reaching victory.

I remember at the college one of my classmates was in tears, after class I found him by the hall trying to control his emotions.

Being concerned, I approached him and asked if he is fine and if there is anything I could do. That’s when he said, I don’t know if I could continue studying. Unsure how to respond, he started to explain that his father has lost his business after so many years of hard work and all his sacrifice is gone. He was worried now how will his family survive, and he thought of dropping out of the college to support his father.

Remembering the incident had made me think no matter how painful mastering patience is but it will bear fruits.

We are naturally impatient and quick in getting frustrated when stuck in traffic or when the queue is long.

We are quick to make a decision without giving it a thought and jump to a conclusion when the situation turns against us.

The matter of fact is that we have been taught all our lives to be patient. I was once told that time is in our hands but we wasted it by being impatient.