On Patience

Lasting, non-reactive expectancy, unrelated to events.
Awareness of complexity.
Control of anger.
Lets things ripen and grasps the possibility of change without the anxiety of anger, which instead is reactive.

The project is an anticipation of the world arising from the state of things. You don’t react to events, but you don’t deny them either: you let them ripen. Events should not be seized upon right away, but should be perceived as a crossroads that at each moment ripens the future.
Circumstances are something in which something different ripens. Being reactive you don’t see this.

Patience allows good to ripen out of evil too. It helps us to bear exacting things, ills inflicted upon us by fate; as well as to put up with those inflicted upon us by men.

In patience, the soul is not anxious, but grows peaceful.
The utmost peace is the one we achieve and win through detachment.
Absence of anxiety by restraining anger.

Ills of fate: anger makes us curse the world, our own birth, life.

Expectancy creates anxiety for the future, because it often goes with the pretention of an intended future.
Instead, patient expectancy is the safe-keeping of the present. It works to prepare the best, the un-expected. Not the expectancy that something will occur: this is subject to disappointment.

Patience is hard-working, bound to perseverance.
The ‘patient’ who is not at work, awaits in vain: while he is pre-tending, he is doing nothing to be at work (perseverance); forbearance means awaiting the overturning, the response; readying for the best (see Leopardi, Zibaldone).

Patience is an an-algesic virtue; not resistance, resignation.
Man is doomed to be patient, to bear boredom.

Salvatore Natoli