Patience

This is the hardest thing for me to have and yet teach my children.  It is patience.  Patience is the ability to wait for something you are working towards but don't have immediate access to yet.  Patience is the ability to work and work towards a goal by taking it slow and building towards it, while not always having success in every battle, keeping your eyes on winning the war in front of you.  I think that patience is something that we, as a society, are losing in our everyday values.  With online streaming of videos instantly, news traveling around the world in a matter of seconds, social media allowing you to keep up with friends and others half the globe away, our world has gotten smaller and more impatient.  We crave satisfaction now and we demand it now.  Fast food restaurants, delivery everything, and video games give us instant satisfaction while we have to wait for the next thing to distract us from our long term goals and our ability to teach patience to our children.  We can distract them with TV or video or computer games, while we are on our tablets or cell phones.  Gone are the days when we tell our children stories and show them that constant hard work towards a goal will benefit them more in the long run and that patience is learning to delay satisfaction in the moment to reap greater rewards later on in life.  Teaching our kids that playing outside and using their imagination, and learning to be patient at times, can give them more blessings and a deeper meaning in life than a life of instant gratification and a longing loneliness that eats at their very being and soul.  A life that is going from one instant satisfaction to another is just shallow and ultimately boring and wasted.  Make your life mean something and remind yourself that patience is a virtue that we all need and should make sure children must possess.