Patience

The virtues get a bad press these days; or, rather, they get little if any press at all. When was the last time you saw an ad extolling the virtues of Temperance? And of all the virtues I'd guess that Patience is near the bottom of the list for most advertising agencies.

Indeed, in many quarters it's positively distrusted as a mewlingly passive sort of quality possessed only of those who are not prepared to Just Do It! And perhaps some of this distrust is valid. Patience as a camouflage for the lack of courage to get on with the business of really living has been a common ailment of some societies in the past, and Blake's great lines remain valid to this day: It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted, / To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer...

But the kind of patience that al Ghazzali speaks of in The Alchemy of Happiness (my reading over our recent umrah) is very different from this bloodless version. The notion of sabr in Islamic thought is a powerfully positive, active force, something akin to Job's determined acceptance of oppression as a way of resisting that oppression. It isn't something you recommend just to the less fortunate, because they've probably got it; it's something you know you need most of all in prosperity when, as the great philosopher astutely points out, you are least likely to have it.

I knew I was going to need plenty of it simply at the level of dealing with the crowds, especially those in Makkah. And, I'm happy to say, I found a depth of it, or was fortunately led to find that depth through the dictates of the experience on offer. It is curiously empowering to force oneself to deal with unreasonable crowds in a reasoning manner. If this sounds suspiciously like complacent boasting on my part, I'm trying hard for it not to be. After all, keeping cool in that situation is not exactly difficult and to some would come wholly naturally. Not to me, I'm afraid. I was embarrassingly aware all the time that a real effort was required on my part not to become foolishly irritated at the most trivial things, and came to understand that a condition of mild irritation over the inability of other people to behave exactly as I want them to is pretty much my default state - except when I choose to alter the setting. I've come to believe that can be done, you can alter some of your seemingly basic characteristics. But it's not easy, not at all.