Ok. I would like you to answer this question. In spirituality, in relationships, in your career and in your life more generally speaking which is the most important quality to have?
Is it love as was stressed by Jesus?
Is it strength and courage as was stressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra and the Spartans?
Is it intelligence and wisdom as was stressed by Socrates, Plato and Bertrand Russell?
Or is it something other than these three? Answer this question to yourself mentally before you read on.
Based on my reading I have a different answer than any of the above. According to my sources the most important quality in life is FORBEARANCE.
Another word that can be used is patience.
Here is what the French philosopher Montaigne wrote in his celebrated essay, Of Experience:
I have suffered colds, gouty defluxions, relaxations, palpitations of the heart, megrims, and other accidents, to grow old and die in time a natural death. I have so lost them when I was half fit to keep them: they are sooner prevailed upon by courtesy than huffing. We must patiently suffer the laws of our condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in despite of all medicine.
’Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children; so soon as ever they are born they thus salute them: “Thou art come into the world, child, to endure: endure, suffer, and say nothing.” ’Tis injustice to lament that which has befallen any one which may befall every one.
http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/experience/
Just this morning I started thinking about this subject. In watching a Hindu spirituality video I was struck by the fact that both the Buddhist and the Hindu practices want us to do what the Mexicans taught their kids: to suffer, endure and hold your peace.
Buddhist practices would have you free yourself of craving and aversion.
Hindu practices would have you to be established in the Atman while witnessing the manifestations of the Universe.
It amounts to the same thing. This attitude of forbearance may well be the goal both practices are aiming at.
For more on this subject please visit the link below:
Start from 32 minutes onwards till the end of the video. The passage I am asking you to listen to is about 36 minutes. The talk is given by Swami Sarvapriyananda who is a monk of the Ramakrishna Mission.
I will end with a few quotes:
It is only by practising mutual restraint and self denial that we can act and talk with other people ; and, therefore, if we have to converse at all, it can only be with a feeling of resignation. … A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life. It is a supply which we shall have to extract from disappointed hopes; and the sooner we do it, the better for the rest of the journey.
- A Schopenhauer.
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
- Lao Tzu
Patience is the key to contentment
- Prophet Muhammad
How poor are they that have not patience.
What wound did ever heal but by degrees.
- Shakespeare, Othello
Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them – every day begin the task anew.
- Francis de Sales
And a last gem contributed by a reader
The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient
- Warren Buffett
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