Patience –

even the shape of the word irritates me.  High on the P, round in the middle and flat at the end.  Patience.

Most everything in the world takes patience, but what about when I THINK I need something right now. I don’t have time for patience.  Is the opposite of patience recklessness? Sometimes I want to be reckless and risk it all?  I don’t want to be patient and wait for the answer to come. I’d like to decide and move forward, force it! ONWARD! I don’t want to stand still. What makes me want to jump to the other side of something while not experiencing it all. I want to leap.

Patience, lacks control and yet is all about control. I’m all about wanting to know the outcome – what comes next – my foot is tapping – where is THE PLAN!?

I never like waiting. It would be easier if I didn’t have to wait and there’s the issue. The good things in life don’t always appear when I want them to.

Some of the best things, people, learnings I have in my life came from an exercise in patience.  The best thing I can do for myself is know when to leap and when to stay and wait it out – not forever – not to get stuck – but to  give it some space, to be certain.

Patience. It’s never what I want, but is probably what I need at this very moment. Pause. Patience.

There must be something more to learn from this circumstance. Patience. The next thing will come soon enough. It always does.

When I need to have patience and need to stay and wait it out, I always, always turn to the Four Quartets –

… I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought,
for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light,
and the stillness the dancing…

…You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not. ~ t.s. eliot, four quartets