PATIENCE :
The mother of all virtues it certainly is..
Patience/Sabr, allows us to reflect so that one can be appreciative of the substance, circumstances, wonders, encounters, pleasures, pains, accomplishments, irony, riddle, answers, anticipation of life, or be remorseful for actions of oneself that lead to the forgiveness of oneself and others.
It allows room for growth to forgive and make amends to ones and others. It is the primary component for persistance, steadfastness, diligence, self-analysis, friendship, sincerity, understanding, Love, & wisdom.
With patience the ant can eat the elephant. With patience and steadfastness the tortoise won the race against the hare.
Patience will allow one to understand, prevent hasty uninformed decisions, and give room to the balance between heart and head when making decisions about complex matters.
Patience is the mother of resolve, whispering into the ear to give the benefit of the doubt, to be forebeaing, to imagine the shoe on the other foot, to eshew envy, to be grateful, to be optimistic,to look at the entire gameboard of Life.
Patience is always tested no matter how much you think you have there is always need for more. When used more patience is required to acquire more skill at using patience. Through patience we can know tge best version of ourselves, because patience removes the veils that conceal the treasures within us.
Patience helps to answer the largest one word question. Why? Patience has hospitality to “Why,” and to its cousin, “Why not”.
Patience is the best companion for unrequited Love, and the pending death or illness of oneself or of kith and kin (one’s relations) . Patience holds the hand, strokes the brow and wipes the tear, when sorrow visits.
Patience sharpens the sense of humour to help one laugh at oneself. Patience shows the path to piety, through which learning & discovery comes.
Caterpillar sheds its skin to free the butterfly within.
Courage and discretion are children of Patience. Creativity & imagination become manifest because of the patience of meticulous, diligent, & deliberate effort.
GRATITUDE :
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others….
Picking a favorite virtue is like picking a favorite child. It’s the kind of thing you are supposed to pretend not to do but that everyone does anyway. We can toss chastity and temperance out of the ring straight off, obviously. They are important, in their own right, but exactly no one is going to make them contenders for the title. Same for thrift and simplicity. Nice to have, but not first-tier virtues. Fellowship is fine, but a luxury.
And justice?, that is the virtue we would much rather have done unto others than practiced on ourselves. No thanks.
Knowledge acquired through curiosity grounds your other virtues, while leaving to you the choice of what those virtues will be. “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” It is the alpha, the point from which all virtues must begin. Gratitude that allows us to appreciate what is good, to discern what should be defended and cultivated.
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” It is the alpha, the point from which all virtues must begin. Gratitude that allows us to appreciate what is good, to discern what should be defended and cultivated.
You need not believe in God to pursue the virtues (though it certainly helps). Yet if you do believe, then your first instinct in all things must be gratitude: for creation, for love, for mercy. And even if you do not believe, you must start again from gratitude: That a world grown from randomness could have turned out so fortuitously, with such liberality.
“We value these things not because they are triumphant and invincible but because they are precious and vulnerable, because they were not fated to happen, and they are not certain to survive. They need us and our gratitude for them should move us to defend them and to build on them.”
Gratitude magnifies the sweet parts of life and diminishes the painful ones. It is the wellspring of humility and ambition, the magnetic pole for prudence, the platform for courage, the inducement to charity and mercy. And in addition to everything else, gratitude is the engine for progress: We build not because we are dissatisfied with the world as it is, but because we are grateful to all those who have built it to this point, and wish to repay them by making our own contributions to their work.
None of this is to say that the world is perfect it is not. But if it’s to be improved, that improvement will come, one person at a time, through the exercise of virtue—through the conscious decision of all of us to try to be better people, to live better lives, and to make a better world. All of which begins, from first light, with saying “Thank you” for what we have, right here and right now..
