July 12

PATIENCE MONTH: DAY 12: “The most useful form of patience is persistence. Patience implies waiting for things to improve on their own. Persistence implies keeping your head down and continuing to work when things take longer than you expect.”― James Clear

I have a friend who says that “You can have patience and faith and believe you will not go hungry, but you have to go out and work for sustenance because God won’t shove a hotdog through your keyhole.” I love that analogy.

Most often when I am (impatiently sometimes!) waiting for an event to unfold, I have to be busy with doing whatever else is in front of me. Then, when the event is unfolded, in the fulness of time, I am okay with whatever it becomes, because I have employed myself somehow with another project.

When I really want something to come and anticipation is keeping me from being productive in a useful way, I am literally wasting my life for that outcome! It is a terrible waste to squander time. It is all I have in this world of absolute value.

I have learned to crochet while waiting in the doctor’s office, or when I am waiting for an oil change on my car I can go for a walk and do a bit of grocery shopping. I get busy with something other than just sitting and waiting. Or sitting and playing with a screen, unless I am reading a book online or something a bit more mindful than just staring at my silly phone. I hate that!

I can always meditate, any time, any place. I do that too when I have the right space to do it, but most of the time, I get up and move my body around. Or crochet.

There is always something  I can do while waiting. And that keeps me from being impatient or feeling like I am entitled to be done before all the others who wait. It shows maturity that I don’t always feel to be able to wait without complaint about it.

In fact, I am very mindful today, after I listened to someone who could not stop complaining about today’s current situation and how depressed they are because they cannot go out and do things any more. It really woke me up to how many people are complaining about this, over and over again, all the time! So, I am really focused on only the blessings of my life every day.

It is a new paradigm we are learning to live through. So many complaints! What have we really lost? Nothing. Gained? So much. And so many lovely things are happening all around us. Isn’t it a great challenge to find them? I think so. I am really not comfortable listening to healthy, well-fed, employed people complain about their lives. So, I don’t want to be one. I even heard myself say that I was “bored” at one point. I was because I could not tolerate her complaining one more second. I was rude. Sorry…but not really. I had to turn the mirror around and see what I was contributing. Not complaints, thank goodness. I want to exhibit total patience with life as it is unfolding right now. There are some really ugly behaviors going on in the world around us because people have become impatient and nasty about taking care of their own health. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah, and lots of it happening right now. I don’t want to contribute one bit to that, thank you very much!