Vahiguru ji ka Khalsa, Vahiguru ji ki Fatih!

In life, we struggle with patience. As babies, we are impatient to have our basic needs met. We cry when we are hungry or thirsty or need sleep, we get older and must learn how to be patient, how to give things time, how to work at cultivating a sense of steadiness even as what we are looking for has not yet arrived.

We get older and feel that we have become more patient, only to find that there is still more to learn about how to be patient in different ways, in different situations. It seems this is a lesson we must perpetually learn. What is this virtue of patience? For this question, we turn to the words of Baba Farid Ji.

This patience is the purpose of life; O being! If you affirm it,
having grown, you will become like a river; you will not become a stream, having broken off.

This patience is the purpose of life.

We pause.

We reflect.

Why does Baba Farid Ji call patience the purpose of life? What does patience teach us about our lives, about our relationship with IkOankar (the One)?

In patience, we stop chasing the temporary and the material.
In patience, we quell our constant thirst.
In patience, we are compassionate and understanding of others.
In patience, we endure our separation with grace and humility.

How do we know that we have become truly patient within?
We become like the flow of the river that feeds into the ocean.
We are able to move with the motions of being alive—to roll with the punches, to remain steady even in that movement.

A river has depths. In its flowing, it remains calm and silent. It is vast.

In patience, we can become vast and generous and gracious to all. This is what it means to become river-like. If that patience breaks, we become like a stream—narrow-hearted and selfish, cut off from the ocean, unable to ‘meet’ the vastness from which we come.

May we become like the river.
May we learn how to flow.
May we meet the ocean and emulate its vastness, its grace, its humility.

May the Wisdom-Guru guide us!