At the office I work at one of my coworkers injured his knee while assisting family members with farm work over the weekend. He’s had to get surgery and now hobbles around on crutches. As I watched him manage his way to the copier/printer to get some papers, I realized that despite the initial hardships, there are just a few positives that come from such an injury. Not that I will justify the injury, or suggest that the benefits even make it seem worth it – obviously the pain isn’t fun to deal with, nor would or should you consider injuring yourself to teach yourself a lesson about patience…

What I believe it teaches the individual, is patience. Patience with one self. As you realize you can’t do more than your able, and you have to limit what you do and how fast, you realize that the typical pressures we feel to get things done quickly are actually very trivial in the great run of life. Two years from now, most likely it won’t matter if you took 5 minutes to get those papers copied, or 10 minutes to get them copied. While I don’t expect this to be a blanket statement for all situations (ie, how quickly an EMT works on a person in an ambulance), some of the things we worry about are so trivial.

Once you learn patience with yourself, you then become more patient with others. For example, after you realize that 5 minutes in a day is so trivial, you will begin to be more patient with others on which you interact with. For example, waiting a few extra minutes on a person in a checkout line, because they have a crying kid, or the checker is new and in training… I believe that once we become more patient with ourselves, we can begin to see ourselves in others situations, even in a checkout line.

I was trying to think of a way to portray how when we hear someone elses suggestion, we often may not see the potential the other party sees, as our vision may be limited by what we’ve come to accept as routine or the normality of how things are and should be in our minds. Yet, if we were to learn something beyond our current understanding, it would become apparent to us that Continue Reading