Learning to Love: Patience

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Patience

We have eternity to ‘get it right’!

 But that´s a long time…so brace your ‘horses’ and work on your patience to accept not only your flaws, but the recurrent errors of others.

Now, patience is not tolerance. It is not about accepting wrong-doings, over and over again, but of correcting them and trying to get them right. That is where patience comes in. Exigency makes for excellence, but not everyone develops at the same pace. Evaluation or judgment is difficult, precisely because some have come a long way, having started at the bottom, and though it barely shows, are trying. Others, blessed from birth with added social, economic and physical attributions, seem to go further with an important head start. We have to be patient with everyone. This is one of love´s most difficult qualities (for me, at least).

When I get impatient, I try to imagine the patience needed to love from afar, be it beyond death (as a spirit?), or as a ‘guardian angel?’, or that serene ‘Loving Company’ we sense when we are in need. That is the loving patience we must develop with children who make mistakes, over and over again; or a loved one who loses focus on what he wants and wanders away. We must be patient and continue loving. The challenge is to love, anyway!!!! That is unconditional love.

‘I don´t only love you when you love me back; I don´t only love you, as a condition for a specific response; I love because, though you don´t love me, I do’.

Loving from being true to oneself allows you the freedom to get mad, when hurt; to want to avoid and have time-out from the love one, and still love. You are not dependent on re-assurance from the loved one, because your assurance comes from your own internal loving. Time and distance will give us the serenity and understanding to accept the ‘unacceptable’, from a loved one, to return and walk with him/her, with patient company. This is loving unseen.

I often get that feeling. I seem to be there for everyone, and yet I don´t feel that they care for me. Retribution is nice, but it should not be a condition to love. It is rather, about loving those who need it. We all have to learn to love, but for some, it is easier. We have to get over the ego-self that wants to feel loved. It´s about loving without being loved. We have to get over the pain of feeling rejected. We have to love, and be patient.

That is why we have eternity.