April 12

You know some of your qualities only because they have never been tested. You consider yourself patient, and perhaps you are. But so far hardly anything has lasted longer than you could bear. Your generosity has rarely cost you more than you had to spare anyway.

That isn't a reproach; it's more a lack of sharpness. An attitude that has never met resistance doesn't know its limits, and so it doesn't know its shape either. It remains an assumption about you, not something you do.

The test can't be brought about, though. If you deliberately seek out difficulties to practise your steadfastness, you have already chosen the conditions yourself. That is exactly what separates practice from the real thing. What truly demands something of you comes at a bad time, on a day when you have little in reserve, and it doesn't ask whether you're ready.

Then it sometimes turns out that your patience is shorter than you thought. Sometimes, too, it holds at a point where you would never have expected it. Beforehand you could have said neither.