Greetings Friends,
Welcome to our new course, Wisdom is the Way: The Timeless Art of Leading a Life. Over the next few months, we will explore and discuss a series of timeless perspectives, principles, and practices. I decided to deliver this course (exclusively to our members) here on Substack. If you’re already a member, no action is needed; if you’re not and would like to partake, consider becoming one.
***There is a new tab on the Perennial Meditations page titled Courses. You can find an overview and introduction to the course, along with the course content, meetup invites, and exercises as they are released.
The Wisdom of Patience
To begin our course, I thought sharing a meditation on the seldom-discussed virtue of patience could be helpful. We’ve all had moments with a lack of patience or heard the cliche “patience is a virtue.”
But what role does patience play in self-development or this course?
It’s been said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in three months and drastically underestimate what we can achieve in three years. The ideas we’re going to discuss in this course are lifelong endeavors. An aspect of wisdom is learning to be patient with ourselves, others, and the world.
Patience (with ourselves)
The poet Ranier Maria Rilke suggested we become comfortable with uncertainty and have patience with life’s questions. He wrote in Letters to a Young Poet,
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers.
According to Rilke, we must have patience with ourselves. He stressed, “To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree.” Life will come regardless. But only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and patient.
