Hopefully you're all practicing patience a lot formally. Sit still. Stand still. Walk gently back and forth. Is the afternoon session four hours and 15 minutes long? (laughter). Hopefully you're practicing patience during those times. Your formal practice is full of moments of practicing patience. The mosquito lands on your arm. What are you going to do? Some of you can work with mosquitoes quite well. Some of you can't do it well enough yet. Can you be more patient the next time the mosquito lands on your arm? Can you be patient, standing, waiting to get into the bathrooms when all the doors are locked? Even if it has been five minutes already, and nobody has come out! Can you be patient? Standing, waiting. Waiting for your food in the back of the line, and that person up there is just so slow. Can you be patient? All these times are informal moments of your life. But you have to practice patience, or else what happens? You would make yourself upset, right? It's as simple as that. What's the opposite of being patient? It is being upset. And who is making you upset? You are.
Compassion is in here again as well. It's the essence of having patience. Why do you want to make yourself upset? You're standing in line for the bathroom, you know you can hold it a bit longer, so what does it matter if it is five minutes or six minutes or seven minutes? What else do you have to do, especially in a retreat, but even out of retreat? So often we get so upset. What is the classic in the West? Traffic jams, right? Bangkok is the same thing. Traffic jams. People lose their patience. They're all sitting in their cars being upset. How many people think of the accident in front? When you are in a really bad traffic jam on a highway in the West, what's the reason? It is often an accident. And when you're getting close to the accident, and the police are waving you by, what you see? Usually, you see a mess. A car got smashed, a truck is on top and even if you don't see any bodies, you can still imagine what it was like. Three miles back up the road, when you were first in the traffic jam, you were getting upset. Why? Aren't you happy that you were not the first car, which is under the truck? How many times can we change our thoughts like this?
When you're impatient, what's the reason? You want what you cannot have. Okay, what do we teach you to reflect about? Dukkha comes. You get injured, you get ill, you get separated from what you like to be with, you have to be with what you don't like to be with. You don't get what you want. Every retreat, you hear me say that often, throughout the retreat. That's part of life, and that is what we have to reflect upon regularly, and it will help us get more patience.