This allows us to understand ourselves and understand our bodies more thoroughly
“Patience is a virtue” is a saying we hear quite often. Yet, it is difficult for a lot of us to practice patience. Because of this difficulty we miss out on a lot of things. I know this sounds counterintuitive. We may think that not having patience and moving on to the next thing or trying to force things to work quicker allows us to have more experiences. The problem is without patience the experiences we have are only surface level. We don’t experience anything in its entirety due to our lack of patience. There are many examples of this within the martial arts. One way I have seen a lack of patience affect our martial arts is when we try to rush learning techniques.
When we rush learning techniques, we don’t fully allow ourselves to understand the intricacies of the techniques, nor do we allow ourselves to fully experience the proper execution of the technique. Rushing the technique causes us to miss out on perfecting the technique and completely understanding how to implement it into our style, or even worst we completely give up learning the technique altogether. I often see martial artists expecting to learn techniques immediately and complain to their instructor that the technique is too hard or that the technique is just not for them.
I do understand we are all different people with different body types and different mentalities, and there will be different things we find difficult because of these differences. However, I don’t believe we do ourselves justice when we give up on something before we get a chance to fully experience it. Bruce Lee once said, “I don’t fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” It takes a lot of patience to practice that much. After practicing something enough, we may still find it to be difficult, but the difference is we will begin to understand why it is difficult. We start to understand the details of the technique and begin to understand why parts of the technique doesn’t quite work for us. This allows us to understand ourselves and understand our bodies more thoroughly. The technique isn’t difficult to us just because it is difficult, but it is difficult because “this one thing about me makes this particular thing about the technique difficult to execute.” Through patience we fully experience the technique, we begin to understand the technique, and we begin to understand ourselves more.
Just as patience allows us to have a more intimate martial arts experience. Patience in other areas of our lives will allow us to better appreciate the things around us. Whether it is having the patience to slowly learn a language or the patience to wait to buy a house or car so we can try to get the best one. Having patience can allow us to have more meaningful and intimate experiences in our lives.; allowing us to slowly bring out the best in ourselves over time.
