In the domain of action, an essential first step is doing nothing, when that is the best we can do.

• If anyone who has been once or twice warned remains obdurate, do not argue with him . . . [Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (ca. 1450).]
• During the next half-century and more, my race must continue passing through the severe American crucible. We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use skill; in our ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance, to be great and yet small, learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant of all. [Booker T. Washington, “Address to the Harvard Alumni Dinner” (1896)]
• For men whose ambition neither seas nor mountains, nor unpeopled deserts can limit, nor the bounds dividing Europe from Asia confine their vast desires, it would be hard to expect to forbear from injuring one another when they touch, and are close together. These are ever naturally at war, envying and seeking advantages of one another, and merely make use of those two words, peace and war, like current coin, to serve their occasions, not as justice but as expediency suggests, and are really better men when they openly enter on a war, than when they give to the mere forbearance from doing wrong, for want of opportunity, the sacred names of justice and friendship. [Plutarch, Lives: Pyrrhus (75 A.C.E.).]
• Formed to live with such an imperfect being as man they ought to learn from the exercise of their faculties the necessity of forbearance: but all the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience; or, the most sacred rights belong only to man. The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong . . . [Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Chapter 5.]

Before we begin to work on affirmative virtues like generosity or responsibility, we do well to establish a framework for what we will not do. No doubt I could look back on my own childhood as a guidepost, if I could see it objectively enough to evaluate it along these lines. My children will be delighted to know that I remember their childhoods better than my own, and so I will use one or both of those as a framework for this discussion – no mentioning of names but you know who you are. I noticed that the first order of business in the moral training of children is to get the little critters’ attention. With some children – again, no names will be mentioned – this can be a prolonged and difficult undertaking. The object is to conform the child to certain standards of behavior, such as not throwing a tantrum when one does not have one’s way. This is known as forbearance, an art the parent is practicing while waiting for the child to learn it. Done successfully, it sets the framework for many years during which the once-child lives a productive and responsible life.

Forbearance is the action component of humility. It is a purposeful absence of action, the taming of desire, sometimes humorously expressed as “the basic confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s desire to choke the living daylights out of some jerk who deserves it.”

We are at a very early point in spiritual development. In fact, we have not even reached the commandment stage, as in “thou shalt not kill.” There is no content in the deferential virtue of forbearance; we are simply mastering the skills of overriding our reptilian inclinations. In that, a little humor may be useful. Sometimes it works out quite well.