Patience

What is patience?
From what I've learnt its something that separates the great from the immature, but what exactly is it?

Its like the monster in LOST, you know its there, you know what it does or what it can do, but you never quite understand what its made of.

The following are some of my personal theories on what patience could mean.

Its a more personalized version of "Hope" - Hoping that a problem, usually caused by someone else's intentional wrong doing will solve itself because the person will understand what is being done is wrong. You know that the person's wrong but you accept the fact that you cannot change it unless the person decides to change by themselves, and this won't happen any faster if you keep "nudging" them to change.
Actually come to think of it, this rate of "nudging" is invertionally proportional to the rate of change of said quality and or action(atleast when teenagers are involved).
Does the same thing apply - when you realize that you are not perfect, and what you will say could be wrong and optionally what the other person's saying could be right.

That gets me to another point - Just delaying yourself - Is that patience?
More often than not I'm deleting out whole lines that I've written in a chatbox, not because it seems out of context, but because it seems rude. I have a feeling that if I could just do the same to when I start talking I could be perceived as more patient - which in turn would give me more patience.

Is calmness equal to being patient. Obviously it has to do something with being patient, but the sanity of the calmness and the situation have so much to do with it. If you're calm in an argument, that could be patience - unless you've already lost - then you're "silent with shame".

Patience to go through tough times comes partly from hope and partly from diligence - according to me, if you believe that you've been doing the right thing, or you know what it is that needs to be done and you're willing to sacrifice older habits for solving a problem.

After having said everything, I still like this

"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone." Alan Watts