“Every moment, every challenge, every inner reaction is here to show you exactly what you need to let go of in order to be free.” ~Michael A. Singer
The other day, while standing in the kitchen, I grabbed my phone to send a text, but it didn’t recognize my face. Suddenly, every time I wanted to use it, I had to enter my four-digit code. The whole process took no more than two seconds, yet I caught myself sighing with exasperation every time.
My reaction surprised me. Had I become so accustomed to immediacy that even such a tiny delay felt agitating?
The pace of our lives has changed remarkably quickly in just one generation. My mother, born in 1928, grew up in a small town in Hungary where her family’s water came from a well in the center of town. She couldn’t simply turn on the faucet—water for cleaning, cooking, and bathing had to be carried in buckets for over a mile and then heated on a coal-fired stove.
My mother’s phone number was 2, the post office was 1, and live operators had to connect all the calls. The concept of FaceTime would have been viewed as preposterous science fiction.
I was born in Brooklyn in 1963 and grew up having to wait an entire year for the annual TV broadcasts of my favorite movies: The Wizard of Oz and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. For decades, if I needed to make a call when I was away from home, I had to wait my turn at a public telephone booth, coins in hand.
When my children were young, we waited in lines to drop off rolls of film for developing and then waited days to see the photos. We stood in line at banks, video stores, and record stores. When we were headed somewhere we’d never been before, we had to stop at gas stations to ask for directions and buy paper maps that were almost impossible to refold.
Yet now, having to enter a passcode to open a phone that provides me with instant access to an entire world of information, entertainment, and connectivity in the palm of my hand had become a source of frustration.
This episode with my broken Face ID brought into vivid focus one of the downsides of modern technology. Speed is seductive because every shortcut—one-click shopping, AI search results, text messaging, instant payment apps—quietly trains us to expect immediacy. We adapt so quickly that yesterday’s miracles become today’s expectations, and even two extra seconds can feel unacceptable.
Patience—our ability to remain calm when life doesn’t move as quickly as we want it to or in the way we’d ideally like—grows with repetition. But waiting is only good practice when we’re willing to stay present with feelings of frustration and discomfort instead of automatically reaching for a distraction.
Learning to relax with life’s little frustrations helps us get better at coping with the bigger ones, but many conveniences remove a tiny bit of the friction that helps us build this particular emotional muscle, making it all the more important to exercise it intentionally.
When we practice letting go of needing things to go our way, we increase our distress tolerance.
Low distress tolerance has been linked with anxiety, depression, substance use, eating disorders, and other forms of psychological suffering. Increasing our distress tolerance—expanding our capacity to experience uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, urges, or physical sensations without immediately trying to escape them—is strongly associated with better mental health.
Not long ago, daily life was filled with plenty of time to let your mind wander, like long walks to and from the public village well. While we’ve adapted remarkably quickly to modern technology, our minds and nervous systems still need regular opportunities when we’re not inundated with new information so we can slow down, reflect, and process our experiences.
Exploring my Face ID aggravation more deeply, I realized how much impatience relates to presence—the willingness and ability to fully embrace life in the here and now.
When we’re impatient, we’re essentially rejecting the present moment. We want it to be over or for something else to be happening. It’s the urge to race ahead into a different moment instead of slowing down and relaxing into reality as it is.
As an experiment, I decided not to immediately try to fix my Face ID function. Instead of viewing this inconvenience as a problem to eliminate, I chose to use it as an opportunity to illuminate deeper truths about myself and my relationship with my phone.
I saw how rarely I resist my phone’s powerful pull and how constant, lightning-fast connectivity reinforces the overly hurried pace at which I move through life. It also keeps me living too much in my head rather than fully inhabiting my body.
The tiny pause of entering my code gave me just enough space to practice cultivating the qualities I want to embody—relaxation, groundedness, and ease—instead of blindly entering the world of screens full speed. Every time I saw the touch screen and noticed my annoyance rise, it became an opportunity to take a deep breath or two and intentionally come back to myself and the moment at hand.
The more I stayed with this experiment, the more I noticed similar invitations to take a sacred pause and reclaim my agency.
Impatience arises so often: sitting at a red light, standing in a long line at the grocery store, arguing with an AI chatbot that keeps misunderstanding my request while I’m trying to speak to a real person. All of these moments are opportunities to resist reaching for my phone or another habitual distraction—to strengthen my capacity to stay present with the reality before me.
Every time I was able to notice tension building when I wanted a moment to end or be different, I tried to relax and observe the agitation instead of trying to eliminate the cause. When I did this, I felt more connected to the wisest, most equanimous part of myself that can remain steady in any situation.
A few days later, after restarting my phone for an entirely different reason, Face ID suddenly started working again. I was surprised to notice that my first reaction was disappointment. What had initially felt like an annoying glitch had become an unexpected gift.
My broken Face ID taught me that every little annoyance carries the potential to wake us up.
Every urge to speed up can become an invitation to slow down, and every small frustration can become an opportunity to practice presence. Every time we choose to accept life as it is instead of fighting it, we strengthen our ability to meet life with more peace and resilience.
About Myra Goodman
Myra Goodman is the award-winning author of four books and the creator of Quest for Eternal Sunshine—an online platform offering free resources for healing and well-being. In her first career, Myra co-founded Earthbound Farm, where she spent thirty years growing the company from a backyard garden into the world’s largest grower of organic produce. Sign up for her free monthly newsletter and follow her work on Instagram and Facebook.
