Patience is the key to relief.
What makes this observation remarkable is Ali's suggestion that relief doesn't arrive through force or haste, but through a particular quality of *waiting*—the difference between suffering while time passes and suffering while you're actively preparing for what comes next. Most people assume patience means passive resignation, but Ali implies something harder: that the *work* of patience itself becomes transformative, not merely its passage. When you're caring for an aging parent through a long illness, the difference between clock-watching misery and patient attention—noticing small improvements, adjusting your expectations, finding moments of grace—actually does change how the burden feels, sometimes before circumstances change at all.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason...”
Marcus Aurelius“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. I...”
Viktor Frankl“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca