On Asking The Universe for Patience

There are times in life when shit just goes wrong. Not just a single little shitty thing, but a veritable compilation of shitty things. They have a tendency to happen all at once, causing stress, frustration, and a whole lot of emotions that, most of the time, we’d just rather not feel - certainly not all at once!

Time seems to compress or dilate, and because of the sheer volume of complications, everything tends to seem much more serious than it is—much bigger than it is.

Some of us are lucky enough to have strong support to hold onto while the storm of life comes crashing through, and there’s a part of us, a part that would settle us down if we had just a bit more patience, that knows we’re overreacting and that things are less, well, serious.

We may even ask or plead for more patience, knowing that there’s a dwindling source of it somewhere within us. This hint suggests that more could be had if only the universe or some higher being would hear our plea and grant it. But what does the universe do when we ask it for patience?

It gives us more opportunities to be patient, that’s what.

I don’t believe that anyone who knows me would call me a particularly spiritual person, but I do have an assortment of funny little hard-held beliefs that cross the threshold of contrasting and conflicting ideologies. One of them happens to be that the Universe (with a capital U, for some reason) likes to test us in humorous ways. William B Irvine, a student of stoicism and a great storyteller, likes to attribute these little tests to the Stoic Gods - despite Stoicism being a nontheistic religion - and gives himself a little grade on how he’s reacted to the situation afterwards.

Last year, I set out to focus my entire year on mobility and ended up tearing my patellar tendon, making it my least “mobile” year to date. Damn you, Stoic Gods! Not believing in a personal god, when I ask the universe for patience, I know that I’m really asking myself to be patient.

Another quirky belief I carry with me is that I am tremendously lucky, in both the “good” and “bad” ways. For every airline upgrade I receive (which happens a surprising amount of times), I also break a toe, accidentally delete an entire hard drive, or get hit by a car (I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been solidly yet gently hit by a motor vehicle in my lifetime). When something really good happens to me I often ask myself, “I wonder how I’m going to pay for this later…” and then a bird will poop in my open coffee cup.

Some philosophers would rightly argue that Luck and the Universe playing helpful little pranks on me are my way of attributing meaning to what is, more than likely, a series of random events. Don’t get me wrong; randomness can also be fun, but I like to think that when everything seems to be going wrong all at once, there’s a reason for it, even if deep down I know that the reason is that things just happen because things just happen.

So maybe the next time you find yourself asking the universe for something, think about what it might be giving you instead.

I hope this was, if not useful, then at least comical (and no, I didn’t drink the bird poop coffee)