Patience is definitely a virtue

Have you ever being driving behind a really slow car, or worse, a really slow truck. So you become irritated and decide to change lanes, but as soon as you change to the next lane, the slow car in front turns to go somewhere and the lane that you were in then becomes the faster lane, and you’re thinking; “stupid, I should’ve just stayed where I was and had a little patience”. This happened to me again this morning. It’s happened before, and each time I tell myself, “next time I’m just going to have patience and take it easy”, but next time I still find that I am not patient enough, and I am not a speed freak or anything, I just really don’t like being late for appointments and thus I lose my patience. In any case, this morning I really began to think about life and patience.

You often hear that “PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE”, but I guess this has become one of those clichéd things that we tend to ignore because we’ve heard it so many times. But seriously, when you really consider these words, you’ll find that it is absolutely true and I think the thing that makes patience the biggest virtue is that it’s something that is not always easy to practise. When I think about things, it seems that most problems in life wouldn’t be a problem at all if we just had patience. All our worries would be non-existent if we just patiently waited to see what Allah (SWT) has planned for our lives.

Allah Almighty repeatedly tells us in the Holy Quraan that through patience and prayer we will be successful, and Allah loves it when we are patient! So how come patience is something so difficult to maintain? I think it’s because we’ve become accustomed to having things our way and getting everything we want when we want it, without having to wait. Everything is so easy for us, Alhamdullillah; but we don't realise that we are in the “instant gratification” age. We don’t know how to wait for things. If we want to buy something we can do that easily, most of us don’t have to save up for ages to buy simple things, like our parents had to do. Of course there’s this interesting thing called “CREDIT”, that’s contributed to this, so it has become easy to get out the credit cards if you don’t have enough cash. (Let me just add here that I am totally against the entire system of credit and of course all the interest money that accompanies it).

Nevertheless, this instant gratification doesn’t only apply to things we buy, it applies to other aspects of our lives as well, and because of this we expect things to happen in our lives immediately and when they don’t, we don’t know how to handle it effectively.

This applies to our duaas (prayers) as well. We know that we should ask Allah (SWT) for things, but then after a short while if it seems that we are not getting what we asked for then we may begin to wonder why our prayers are not being answered. If we were to remain patient then we would see that surely Allah (SWT) has listened to us and accepted our prayers, the results are just going to happen on its own time.

I am guilty of being impatient on many occasions and I have to keep reminding myself of the extreme importance of having patience. It also seems that when we’re supposed to be the most patient, that’s when patience is the hardest to practise. Someone once told me that when you think you can’t be any more patient, that’s when patience actually really begins! Shoo, it seems really daunting doesn’t it, but I really think that this is one of the major keys to living a happy life. There are many examples in my own life that has shown me this, I’m sure that you can find many examples in your life too.

So I guess the next time I’m driving behind a really slow car or truck I should just sit there, take it easy and enjoy the ride, even if it is really, really slow.

Image from: http://theballerinaproject.blogspot.com/