Ego and Patience – Silent Killers

Waiting for others to live up to our expectation is a waste of time.

Reflect on this story.

A family of tortoise went on a picnic. They packed food and set out to a place they had selected… behind the hills. When they reached the spot, they unpacked their picnic basket. They realized they had forgotten to bring salt. Food without salt is tasteless.

They had a conference to decide who should go back and get salt. After a lot of discussion, the youngest tortoise was chosen, as he was faster than the others.

The youngest objected on the ground that before he could come back the others might eat the snacks. But they assured him they would wait for him to come back with salt. Six months passed, but the youngest tortoise did not turn up. So the rest of the family decided to open the basket and eat the snacks. When they opened the snack basket, the little tortoise jumped out of the bushes and screamed, “Look, I knew you would not wait till I came back. For six months I have been hiding in these bushes to make sure you would not eat without me. Now my suspicion has been confirmed, and I am not going to get the salt.”

Some of us are exactly like our suspicious tortoise: we waste our own time waiting for people to live up to our expectations. Instead of doing the right thing ourselves, we wait for others to act in ways we expect them to. We waste our time waiting for others to live according to our expectations. We have not learned to enjoy doing what our intuitive judgement tells us is the right thing.

Is stress related to egoism?

Yes, very much. Egoism implies our conviction that we are more important than others, and our beliefs are the truth. Ego means our point of view is more important than that of others, more important than even truth. So we are trapped within our point of view. Not only are we arrogant about our point of view, we believe in our infallibility. This arrogance creates stress. Being stuck to our point of view creates stress.

Reflect on this.

A husband and wife were quarrelling. Each kept screaming at the other. The house was a living hell. Then the husband walked out of the house. The couple’s teenager son, seeing his father walk out, asked his mother, “Is Daddy going to be back?”

“Yes, he will be back in half an hour,” replied the mother.

“Damn,” said the youngster in obvious disappointment, “I thought of eating his dessert.”

When self-interest or ego prevails in our mind, we begin to compete with everyone for everything, no matter what the cost. We do not see beyond our self gratification.

Be playful and flexible. If you need to work long hours in the office, enjoy it, play with it. Convert the work place into a fun place with commitment.

Then you don’t work for joy, work itself becomes joy.

Drop the ‘I’ and ‘mine’ and live in the ‘We’. The universe is one. It is, and has, a unity. Don’t live in the division of the ego. Without the ego, we experience a beautiful connectedness with everything else in the great chain of being: with the birds, the stars, the sky and the trees. You can envision them to be different parts of your body, or yourself to be part of one or more of them. It is this connectedness that is known as ‘Nirvana’. Reality is unity and illusion is division.

What lies at the root of impatience?

One has to cultivate the state of being patient. We have to trust the universe with its own ways of opening and closing windows of opportunity and doors to happiness and prosperity. We have to learn to be patient. A boy loved mangoes. He bought the best of seeds and planted the mango seed. Every morning he would dig the earth to see if it had sprouted. In this process he never allowed the seed to sprout. Our impatience works in the same stupid way.

Impatience is a result of lack of trust. We trust our ego and not the miracle of life. Since we depend on our ego, we take for granted the way nature reveals her mysteries. Our imagination projects a reality and we don’t recognize anything else as real. We are lost in our subjective reality.

Patience is a spiritual quality and discipline. Patience is predicated on the faith that God knows better than we ever can hope to know what is good for us. Impatience, on the other hand, asserts, “God should be clever enough to let me have things my own way because, after all, what I want is paramount.” Patience accepts that God’s will is greater than my will.