Patience vs. Tolerance

Once I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine. He asked me the difference between patience and tolerance.

I had read a Tamil poetry when I was 10 years old. The poet had described the patience of mother earth. Earth is patient with the farmer as he tears her surface open and sows the seeds. Earth is patient with the seed as the seed takes in the rain water and tears her deeper, planting herself with the help of her roots.

Having read this poem I appreciated the patience of mother earth towards all of us. Unfortunately we assumed this to be tolerance and stretched our luck too far. We started piercing her with harder tools and deeper still. We could not stop with food and basic shelter. Slowly her patience started wearing away. We are now experiencing landslides and earthquakes. Mother earth is running out of patience.

So this is the difference between patience and tolerance. While patience wears off, tolerance does not.  Tolerance can be understood as the everlasting patience, which comes out of a certain realisation that the situation will not change.

Some interesting ways of differentiating between the two would be thus:

·         While most of us are tolerant towards our children, our patience for our spouse wears off.

·         We not only tolerate the mistakes done by people we like, we also defend them. But we have very little patience towards people whom we despise.

·         While it is a virtue to tolerate one’s unfavourable circumstances, one needs to be patient till it changes.