Patience: How to Practice
03.27.23 | 55105
For reflection:
Patience is a key factor in the process of getting better at skills you want or need to have. What skills are you currently working to develop? How does patience play a role in building that skill?
Do you consider patience itself to be a skill that you can hone and develop over time?
Are there any specific circumstances that make you more willing to be patient?
Our biggest goals and dreams sometimes require us to be patient. What long-term dreams do you have, and how does patience fit into the realization of them?
I’m sure I’m not alone in having heard that saying growing up - “it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something.” While I’m pretty sure that specific statistic has been debunked by now, the general principle holds true: getting better at something requires a lot of time - and a lot of patience. Today, I’m reflecting on my experience learning Spanish as a skill that has required my continued dedication and which has taught me how to practice patience in a tangible way.
I began taking Spanish classes in high school. As many people do, I thought that this was an expectation and requirement for getting into a ‘good’ school. Don’t ask me what that means, either - I’m pretty sure they told us that all kinds of schools liked to see foreign languages on our transcripts.
But regardless of the initial reasons for learning Spanish (external validation), I bought in pretty quickly. My four years of high school Spanish quickly translated (no pun intended) into two more years of college courses in oral and written expression, literature, and translation. And then, in the fall of 2018, in my third year of college, I flew to Cusco, Peru to test my Spanish wholeheartedly for the first time. I moved in with a host family that didn’t speak any English, and I took classes in Peruvian history, Indigenous peoples, and globalization.
I’m talking about all this because no amount of classroom work could have prepared me for the challenge of learning daily conversational styles with my host parents, bus drivers, street vendors, grocery workers, and more. I could not have truly prepared for what it would be like to explain my life in the United States to my 8- and 6-year old host cousins. As much as I would have liked to learn the vocabulary for the local foods and customs, I wouldn’t have known the weight that those traditions held in the community. There was simply too much that was specific to the mountains of Peru that I hadn’t learned previously. There was an accent that my professors and teachers hadn’t had. And, most important of all, there was an inability to lean on a shared knowledge of English when my Spanish faltered. For the first couple weeks, I went to bed exhausted every night from learning new vocabulary and customs, and from finding the words in Spanish to describe the words I didn’t yet know.
I describe all this with the hope of demonstrating how deeply not easy it was to live in Peru. Over the months I lived there, my Spanish language knowledge growth-curve became exponential. But it required me to be patient with myself and with the others around me who were helping me learn.
Learning Spanish didn’t just not happen overnight - rather, it has been an ongoing process for over ten years now. While I am now able to speak pretty freely with most people, my Spanish is still better on paper than it is in my mouth - because those are different skills, and I have trained one more than the other. As it has been an ongoing process, there has always been more to learn, and that reality has required patience at every step to keep moving forward.
Of course, learning Spanish is not the only process that has required my patience over the years - learning to play the piano and the viola, learning to bake, and growing faster and stronger have all taken years of my life. So, I’m curious - what skills have you developed, or would like to develop, that require ongoing patience and baby steps of progress? How do those skills benefit from patience? How do those skills help to train patience in you? And how does that type of patience compare to other versions of patience you have practiced?
Until next time, friends.