The Stoic Practice of Patience
Hospitals are made of waiting. Waiting for a doctor to make rounds, for a test result to come back, for a mother’s breathing to even out after a restless night. The hours stretch and bend in odd ways. Days lose their shape, and with them the sense of routine that usually steadies a life. In these places, impatience often comes first. There’s an urge to will things forward, to force clarity, to find answers that simply will not arrive on command.
Patience has been on my mind because mine has been tested. I’ve had to spend a lot of time in a hospital room these past two weeks, and for the past week, just there and my mother’s empty home (as she and I are both COVID positive after her short stay at a rehab facility). I received one of those daily emails, and this one was quotes on patience, as if the world knew what I needed. Rousseau says it is bitter but sweet in its fruit. Gandhi warns that to lose patience is to lose the battle. Margaret Atwood likens it to water wearing down stone. They are reminders that waiting has a place in the story of a life. That impatience has never cured anyone or solved a mystery before its time, but it is certainly easy to fall into.
The Stoics did not count patience among their four cardinal virtues. Yet it is within them all. Patience is courage because it endures hardship without running. Patience is temperance, because it reins in anger and rash action. Patience is justice, because it waits before judging. And patience is wisdom, because it discerns what cannot be rushed.
The Weight of Waiting
Marcus Aurelius lived much of his reign in waiting rooms of a different sort. He waited for wars on distant borders to end, for plagues to recede, for Rome to recover from disasters beyond his control. He reminded himself, again and again, to accept what unfolded slowly. “Time is a river,” he wrote, “a violent stream of events. As soon as a thing is seen, it is carried away. Another is carried in its place, and this too will be carried away.”
Epictetus, born a slave, taught his students that some things are up to us, and some are not. To confuse the two is to invite torment. Patience, in this sense, is clear recognition of limits. When the outcome rests outside our control, patience guards us against anger and despair. It allows us to remain whole while time does what it does.
Seneca, who wrote often about the shortness of life, pressed the point further. Our time is limited, he said, yet we squander it in restlessness. “What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” Shakespeare later echoed. A body, a soul, nor a society can’t be stitched together in haste.
The Hidden Virtue
The Stoics named wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance as the four pillars of the good life. Patience runs through all four.
- Wisdom waits before choosing, giving judgment time to ripen.
- Courage endures hardship without demanding its immediate end.
- Justice holds back from rash judgment, allowing facts and perspectives to settle.
- Temperance cools the fire of anger that flares when we cannot get our way.
To practice patience, then, is to practice all the virtues at once. It is not passive. It is an active strength, a refusal to be ruled by time’s uneven pace.
The Shape of Practice
The Stoics left us practices to make patience more than a word.
The dichotomy of control reminds us that delay and uncertainty belong mostly to the realm beyond our command. We can prepare, choose, and act, but we cannot force an outcome.
Premeditatio malorum (the rehearsal of misfortune) teaches us to imagine the long road, an illness that lingers, setbacks that refuse to move on our schedule. If we have already pictured the slow work of hardship, it is less shocking when it arrives.
Evening reflection allows us to see impatience for what it was. Where did anger boil up today? Where did I push against what can’t be moved? Could I have waited more calmly? Each night offers a chance to plant a seed for tomorrow.
These aren’t cures for impatience. They are ways to shape it into endurance rather than complaint.
Echoes Beyond Stoicism
Other voices remind us that patience is not only a Stoic theme but a human one.
Confucius counseled, “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” A.A. Milne, through Winnie the Pooh, wrote, “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.” Ovid promised that pain, endured, might someday be useful. Lao Tzu advised that muddy water clears not by straining but by stillness.
This is not a resignation. These are words of endurance. They remind us that what feels like stasis may be growth in disguise, the way a seed germinates beneath the soil.
I’m hoping for growth from all this.
A Somber Hope
Rousseau was right: patience is bitter. No one tastes the hours in a waiting room and calls them sweet. Yet he was also right about its fruit. A calmer spirit, a stronger endurance, a wisdom not easily shaken. These things are the fruit of patience.
The Stoics remind us that all things are carried on the current of time. Some arrive swiftly, some slowly, some never at all. Our choice is not whether we wait, but how.
In the end, patience is a kind of faith. Not blind faith that all will be well, but steady faith that we can endure whatever comes, and perhaps even grow from it. As Ovid wrote two thousand years ago, “Someday this pain will be useful to you.” The usefulness may not be obvious, but the endurance itself shapes who we are becoming.
And that is enough.
