For the month of November, I’ll be practicing the paramita kshanti, which means patience. It is also translated as forbearance. Kshanti is the quality of being steadfast, regardless of what’s happening around you. It’s steadiness and endurance and has the sense of a kind of peaceful tolerance. The Sanskrit word for peace is shanti, so you can see the close relationship between peace and patience. (Those who know the fruit of the Spirit may remember that peace and patience are listed right next to each other, so this relationship seems to have a universal resonance.)

Here’s another little something interesting. The Chinese ideograph for kshanti is a sword hanging over a heart. If you read my very first Soul Ninja post, you might recall that the word ninja means “one who endures.” And the Japanese word for endurance is also depicted as a sword hanging over a heart. So practicing patience/endurance/forbearance is a very fitting thing for a soul ninja to do.

Patience is hard to come by in our high speed society. It’s not a virtue we will ever grow in without being intentional about it, because our culture is designed to make us rush. We are constantly thinking of ways to streamline our lives, make things easier, cut out the hassle. Don’t get me wrong– I’m really grateful for that. (Holiday shopping online, Amazon Prime, buying in bulk, mobile ordering my Starbucks, I’m guilty of all of it.) But I have to agree with Lama Surya Das, who says this fast pace of life decreases “our ability to tolerate the inevitable challenges of life.”

We get so used to the convenience that we totally lose sight of our capacity for patience. And we remove ourselves from many of the natural places we could be practicing it.

A few years ago, my family of four arrived in Miami after traveling to the Caribbean and found an overwhelmingly long customs line waiting for us. (DFW airport has a really fast customs system, and we rarely have to wait at all.) After maybe fifteen minutes, one of my kids said, “Isn’t there anything we can do to get out of this line? Don’t we have a pre-pass or TSA or something???”

This was a low parenting moment.

Here my child is coming home from a lovely vacation, and asks if somehow we can skip the inconvenience of coming home through a busy airport. My husband and I certainly don’t try to take away the natural struggles of life, but it seems my child got the memo anyway: Figure out how to get out of inconvenience. That’s the goal. Not to stay in it. Not to practice patience through it. The goal is to get out of it.

I have never walked more slowly forward in line than I did that day. I wanted to make sure the message was loud and clear. We weren’t going to do anything to “get around” the experience everyone else was having. We were going to be in solidarity with everyone and be grateful we have the privilege of experiencing airport inconveniences. We were going to practice our patience every minute along the way.

If I may be very frank for a moment…I’ll also say this. The more financially privileged you are, the more you have access to opportunities to streamline your life. You can pay for tolls, upgrade your ticket, rush ship when you forget a gift, pay someone to clean your house/get your groceries/walk your dogs, the list is endless. I’m not putting judgment on that. But what I think sometimes can happen is that people of privilege can forget how hard day to day life is for so many people. And somehow, ironically, this can give people of privilege a shorter fuse. They (we) can be less compassionate with other people when they don’t get something right, or take too long, or do anything we perceive as an inconvenience.

I think it’s because we have privileged ourselves right out of any capacity for patience.

The good news? This is a fixable problem. Not just for the privileged among us, but for everyone. Impatience, to be very clear, is an everyone problem. And it manifests itself in so many creative ways. Patience is a paramita to practice for enlightened life because it’s so hard for all of us.

Lama Surya Das says patience is about “learning to control our restlessness, irritation, disagreement, or rage.” But it’s also bigger than that. He says it’s a “proactive way of being an agent for harmony and mutual understanding in the world.” In other words, patience is about being present. It’s about staying, even when the line is long, even when the experience is hard, even when we’d rather be anywhere else. Sometimes we need to stay. Endure. Practice patience and forbearance.

Because the reality is, life is hard for everyone. And life being hard is a real inconvenience. (Take this from your girl, who’s having surgery tomorrow that will take her out of her beloved taekwondo for 6-8 months.) But there’s no surefire way to get out of this reality. And eventually, if we haven’t cultivated patience, we will be unable to handle the difficulties that come our way. We will be ill-equipped to be people of harmony. And we’ll just be the jerk in the checkout line complaining and making all the noise.

The people around us deserve better than that. The world needs better than that. And to be honest, we’re better than that.

So let’s get to practicing patience.

Let’s become people who are able to tolerate the inevitable challenges of life, soul ninja style.