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1. Patience is a sign of inner peace. When
one is at ease with oneself, with what one has done with one's life, and
with one's approaching death, time loses its urgency and becomes more an
ocean than a stream.
2. Patience allows one to listen and observe
before one acts or speaks. It allows events to reach maturity, so that choice
can be better informed by circumstance. It allows time for words and acts
to put on weight, so as to appear abroad with sufficient
dignity.
3. One is patient with what one has accepted
and impatient with what one resists. One is patient with what one loves and
impatient with what one resents. Thus the more one loves life and accepts
death and pain, the more patient one will be.
4. If patience expands one's time, tolerance
expands one's space, allowing differences to generate interest rather than
conflict so that one can learn from them and live in a wider
world.
5. When others can also be right, one can begin
to see the world from multiple points of view, and one's field of thought
becomes more like a galaxy than like the narrow mountain valley of one's
birth.
6. The burden of being right contains the additional
burden of proving others wrong, which together is enough weight to keep any
bird from taking flight.
7. Humor, especially self-deprecating humor,
allows one to step outside oneself with a light and varied
heart.
8. Humor arises from incongruity, which arises
from viewing something simultaneously from multiple points of view. It therefore
incorporates both tolerance and patience, teaching self-knowledge through
mischievous pleasure.
9. Humor is the friend of moderation and the
enemy of excess, for excess is a balloon and humor a needle.
10. Patience, tolerance, and humor must be practiced
in moderation, for there are circumstances in which a light heart is not
appropriate, and evils that ought not be tolerated or patiently borne. But
neither ought one be so consumed with evil that one becomes incapable of
happiness. For life is short and evil long, and there is no need to condemn
oneself to live within its prison when all around one the world is bursting
with glory.
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Modern World: Secularization
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Character
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