The 52nd lojong slogan says, “Don’t misinterpret.” At face value, this means going into a situation with the intention to understand. Actively choose not to be ignorant. Ask questions. Assume you don’t know everything. And don’t allow negativity to skew your understanding. Norman Fischer says, “All inflation and disparagement is misinterpretation. You, others, and the whole wide world are as they are. There’s nothing to interpret.”
Again, you could just ponder that and have what you need. But there’s always an opportunity to go deeper. In Buddhist teaching, this slogan actually contains six common misinterpretations. (Why are the shortest slogans also the most complex?!) We’ll go through these over the next few weeks but for now, let’s focus on the first. And that’s patience.
Patience? How can you misinterpret patience?
We can be patient with a whole lot of things in our lives: a terrible boss, a thoughtless dating partner, that tomato plant in our garden. Whether these things deserve our patience is another question altogether. But what often happens when we get to, say, our meditation practice, is that we get very, very impatient. We sit for 5 minutes and can’t get still and give up. We try it for a week and throw up our hands that we haven’t become calm all the time. Basically, we expect supernatural (unnatural?) results from our spiritual practice. We can be very impatient. And this leads us to give up.
We misinterpret patience when we apply it to everything in our lives but the most important thing: our spiritual life. So while it’s great to be patient with that difficult person in your life, or that thorny situation, the place that needs your patience the most is your spiritual practice.
Traleg Kyabgon says we can take an even broader look at patience and see how we so quickly give up any beneficial pursuit- whether that’s cleaning up our eating, or our media diet, or our closets. We have loads of tolerance for dealing with the fallout of a day binge watching television, but we give up at the gym after one hard workout.
Hopefully, these examples help give you some context for what misinterpreting patience looks like. And now the question is: where are you misinterpreting patience in your own life? Maybe you need to kick some situations to the curb that you’ve been far too patient with. And maybe there are some places that could use more patience than you’ve been giving it.
