Tolerance and Patience
Today I was talking to a friend and she told me she was “trying to be more tolerant.” I responded with, “don’t you mean ‘patient?” She thought about it for a moment and asked, ”what’s the difference?” “There’s a huge difference,” I replied, surprised she didn’t know what that was. Do you know what it is?
The difference between patience and tolerance is the presence or absence of judgment.
To be tolerant is to say that you have already made a judgment but you are attempting to ‘not apply it too harshly’…whereas to be patient is to provide some time and space for change before you make the judgment that brings you to a point of intolerance.
Tolerance is the measure of how much stress something can take before it snaps…Patience comes from the Latin word ‘pax’ which means ‘peace’. To be patient is to look for the peaceful way…not to judge and cause upheaval.
To be ‘tolerant’ is far more stressful on the body, mind and spirit than to be ‘patient’. When you tolerate something or someone, you are exhausting your reserves of inner strength to deal with a situation that you have decided will not change.
To be patient with something or someone is to provide a ‘space’ in which things have the potential to change for the better…or worse…but definitely change, rather than stay stuck.
Since we are all magicians and every word we speak is a spell we cast upon ourselves, I suggest that we never use the word tolerate if we can replace it with patient …ever again.
Why?…because it is easier on our biological and psychological systems. It produces less aging material in the body and more social space for solution rather than simply more of the same old problem. Intolerant is even worse!
Think of the chasm between intolerant and impatient! Intolerant means the individual has no flexibility or willingness to see anything other than their own reality, whereas impatient generally means the individual in question does not have a common relationship with another’s timing and would prefer them to get some speed up.
Can you feel how different these two words are now? Patience is a virtue. Tolerance is what comes before the bridge between ‘now’ and ‘then’ collapses and we find ourselves at war again.
Pax…peace…Toll…what we pay …
