August 2016
Welcome to the latest Ripple Effect Word of the Month!
Ready? It’s....wait for it.....
Patience! Exciting, right?
You might have visions of grass growing, paint drying.
But patience comes in handy a lot more than waiting in a
dentist’s office or slogging through the world’s longest
check-out line. Patience is a conqueror (see below).
Read about how patience builds muscles, sharpens your
mind, and supercharges your skills as a martial artist.
Hi-yah!!
Exercising Patience
Sometimes we talk about “exercising patience.”
Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Patience
implies waiting calmly, after all.
But being patient doesn’t necessarily mean being inactive. It means not complaining or obsessing while you wait it out. For a kid at Christmas, as the saying goes, obsession snowballs:
What am I gonna get? What’s in this present? What’s in that one? Why do Mom and Dad
have to sleep so late? Why does Johnny get more presents than me? Why can’t I open them
all right now? Arggghh!!
Exercising patience means not making yourself nuts over something you can’t control. You
might be inactive--you might be sleeping soundly, dreamily passing the time till sunrise.
When you stay up and obsess, any real sense of enjoyment withers away. And when you finally get to rush downstairs and open those presents you're too exhausted to really enjoy
them.
But you might be active, too. Say you just can’t sleep. How can you exercise patience?
Maybe you write in your journal instead. Or draw pictures. Or work on your slow kicks :).
Play a game to pass the time. Whatever moves your focus to something more useful than
the spiraling depths of obsession.
Try it out the next time you’re excited for something big, something for which you just
can’t wait. You’ll find you can, and you’ll love what you waited for all the more when it finally comes.
Think of a time when you’ve been impatient. Remember
how you felt--What was your body like? Shaky? Nerves
twitching, feet stomping, head rocking back and forth?
Next time, try a simple exercise of counting down from
20 (just like when warming up on the mat). See if you
feel more calm, and how much better you feel in that
calmer, more patient state. Go for it!
Classic Quotes on Patience
Here are five top thoughts on patience, straight outta the (capital ‘C’) Canon. Coaches: take a minute to talk to
your kids about what these mean to them!
1. Patience is bitter, but the fruit is sweet. (Aristotle)
It ain’t easy to be patient! Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, agrees that it’s not
much fun to wait. But the patient person (versus the obsessive, complaining one) enjoys what she waits for in the end. Oh so sweet.
2. Patience is a conquering virtue. (Geoffrey Chaucer)
How can patience conquer? Patient people seem idle, right? They’re not doing spin kicks
through castle walls or flashing swords through the enemy ranks. But patience teaches us
how to endure the wrongs of others without losing our minds or our lives in the process.
At the end of the day the patient one is left standing. The impatient are just exhausted.
“One must not chide for trifles nor complain,” writes Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales.
“Learn to endure, or else, so may I go/You'll have to learn it, whether you will or no.”
3. Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Live the
questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without
even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Have you ever felt really, really anxious about something, where you felt like you
just couldn’t wait for an answer or a result? Some things we just want to be over
with. Some things we can’t wait to begin. LIfe’s a journey, and the poet is just
saying absorb it along the way.
4. Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you
put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like
manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be
powerless to vex your mind. (Leonardo da Vinci)
You know the Mona Lisa, right? Da Vinci took years to paint that (and it’s not even that
big!). Imagine the patience of the painter, and the patience of the patron who commissioned the Mona Lisa. Um, Mr. Da V inci, you said I’d have that painting by Friday. It’s
been four years....
5. Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
There’s a reason why characters in old kung fu movies hang out on the banks of
winding rivers and meditate in the green serenity of a bamboo forest. Consider the
patient might of mountains, of the ocean tides. Think of how long the ground lies
frozen hard through winter, how long it takes to thaw in spring. Nature knows what
it’s like to keep up with the long haul. She’s the ultimate model of patience. Look at
her and learn.
Steady Heart, Steady Hand
Fighters often say that timing is everything. And good timing requires patience. Bruce Lee showed some stone-cold patience
in a match to the death in Enter the Dragon. Bruce faces off
against O’Hara, the scar-faced henchman of the evil Mr. Han. The
fighters stand fist to fist in an arena so silent you can hear the
stones. There’s the stare down. A seagull passes overhead
(probably). Then O’Hara twitches, and Lee fires a backfist to his
face. Yee-ouch.
Patience is key in sparring. Without patience, sparring is just flailing. Flap flap flap. Maybe
something lands (but probably it doesn’t). A skilled opponent will just get inside or get away, patiently awaiting an opening to deliver the smackdown. Skilled opponents will also try to trigger a
response from you--get you to block up high so they can hit you low, move one way so they can
land a hit on the open side.
In sparring, like in all aspects of life, there are triggers. And we lose when we get trigger happy. Someone might be really itching to get ahead in the grocery checkout line, bumping your cart as
they jostle into place. That’s a trigger. Your little one might be throwing a fit and saying “I hate
you!” because he doesn’t want to be dragged to the dentist. That’s a trigger. We all know about the
lane-darting, finger-flashing, bumper-hugging triggers on the afternoon commute.
What to do? Take a breath. Smile. Because patience conquers, and the real points come from
keeping your cool.
Coaches’ Corner: Showing Off Your Patience
Hey Coaches! Ever lost your patience? We’re gonna guess you have. Once or twice. Ten times. A
hundred. Still, the number of times you’ve lost your cool with your kids is probably far, far less
that the times you’ve wanted to.
You should congratulate yourself for that. Restraint and self-control are key elements of patience,
and these are wonderful qualities to model for your kids, who will be learning the meaning of patience well through their teen years. If you haven’t spontaneously combusted, you’ll be an unconquerable ninja of patience by then.
In the meantime, be a statue of patience for your kids. Something they can admire and emulate.
Someone in whom they see the posture of patience. Because for this, they look to you. Take the
classic cranky outburst on a long-distance drive: “Are we there yet??” If you’re behind the wheel
making complaints about the slow traffic, pulling at your hair and banging the dash, your kids
take note. If you’re calm as a cucumber while the traffic’s at a crawl, they note that too, and you
have more sway to engage their minds in ways that are fun vs. frustrating.
In situations where the wait seems unbearable, try an alphabet game (e.g., name an animal or
person/place/thing that begins with ‘A’, then the next person names one that starts with ‘B’, then
it goes to ‘C’, and so on). Or just kickstart a conversation. “What are you thinking about?” Is a
pretty good starter :)
Ripple Effect SCHOOL UPDATE
Way to Go Black Belt
Important Dates to
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September 5th
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