Nintai 忍耐

A taste of some of the work I’m doing with the brilliant Mark Hill…..

Nintai 忍耐

Patience, Endurance, Resilience

"Nana korobi ya oki"

Fall seven times, get up eight.

Japanese Proverb.

I was chatting with a friend about one of those life choices that don’t often come around; a clear choice of action that would determine what kind of person I wanted to be. The choice I had made was definitely not the easy choice, but it was the choice to be a better person, and I was telling him about the paralysing fear and excitement that inspired. He smiled and said simply, “Sometimes you just have to do the hard thing.”

That advice has stuck with me since. You can’t run away from it, delay it, ignore it, delegate responsibility for it or wish it were anything else. However, it is your choice how you face it.

Driven by the primitive equations of calories versus energy exertion and honed through our adaptation of technology, humans have evolved a default instinct to look for the easy option. It seems unnatural to quietly endure the difficult, the frustrating, the painful or the frightening – these triggers of our natural fight, flight, flee or freeze instinct. Stories of the human spirit surviving great privation, sorrow and difficulty abound, although we often fail to see the heroes’ qualities in ourselves in more mundane circumstances.

Nintai is a conscious engagement with difficulty, quietly and calmly enduring hardship with self-control. The root words nin mean to endure (the word ninja literally means “one who endures”), and tai , to resist or push through.

This does not imply just a physical endurance or an attitude of constant resistance, but an indomitable spirit that can only occur when a person has a clear understanding of who they are and why they persevere. The theme of Viktor Frankl’s essential work ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ is Nietzsche’s concept that a man will endure any what if he has a strong enough reason why.

I mention this to reinforce that nintai is not resignation or passive waiting, but a deliberate choice to remain calm and still throughout hardship. It is something that takes humility and emotional maturity and is a sign of discipline and dedication that, despite the suffering and adversity, the spirit will remain strong.

This is why nintai is a practice. It is a skill to go against natural instinct and, like soldiers learning to respond calmly in crisis, it takes training. Like an athlete, artist or creator constantly practicing regardless of how repetitive and boring it may seem, it takes endurance. For the gift of will-power it demands the responsibility of complete engagement. It asks you to eliminate ‘kinda/sorta’, ‘not sure’ and ‘doing my best’. It is doing the hard thing, nothing more or less.

While it’s true that this kind of humble, stoic acceptance practices and requires will-power, those that practice nintai come to realise that while will-power may help you get through moments of adversity, what allows you to learn from them is opening up and engaging with the difficulty, responding rather than reacting. Paradoxically, to gain will-power all it takes is willingness.