The last few weeks, I’ve had uninterrupted time to meditate in the morning and write in the afternoon here in beautiful Costa Rica where the national slogan is pura vida — pure life, enjoy life. Have you had this experience — in a place where you feel comfortable and at peace with plenty of time to relax, take care of yourself, eat well, sleep — when you’ve thought: What’s so hard about patience, or kindness, or enlightenment?

Then, you leave.

As I set out on the road today, I thought of Pema Chodron’s words:

“Patience is not learned in safety. It is not learned when everything is harmonious and going well. When everything is smooth sailing, who needs patience? If you stay in your room with the door locked and the curtains drawn, everything may seem harmonious, but the minute anything doesn’t go your way, you blow up. There is not cultivation of patience when your pattern is to just try to seek harmony and smooth everything out. Patience implies willingness to be alive rather than trying to seek harmony.“

Pema Chodron, Start Where you are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

Yes, in my room with the curtains drawn and the neighbors quiet and no dogs barking… I can be my best self! But then travel, and the tiniest irritations manifest within a few minutes. From Chodron and from other teachers, I have begun to learn to have a sense of humor about this: Yep, there I go again, so peaceful this week and now irritated by the person behind me clipping his nails on public transportation (true story today). And I laugh and roll my eyes at myself instead of switching into self-critic. Chodron’s words remind me to laughingly, lovingly accept that I will never be perfectly at peace, nor is that the goal. Peace is not harmony, or a beach sunset view or my own quiet room. Peace is, she says, “willingness to be alive.” And being alive means allowing all the irritations, the frustrations, the fears to be flaring and peeking in and invading my perfectly cultivated inner space, disrupting my mind’s commitment to the tolerant, reasonable person I believe I am. It occurs to me that being truly patient and at peace with others requires patience and peace within ourselves first, with whatever uncomfortable emotion or thought arises and rages. Patience and peace cannot exist in our denial of “negative” feelings — because there is a nagging dishonesty in denying that we are actually irritated or angry. But allowing ourselves and others our honest, in-the-moment existence, negative feelings included, begins the work of true compassion. Only when we meet each other as we really are can we begin to create true harmony out of our differing notes.