P Is For Patience

Wipe that grimace off your face and don't whinge! I know that patience is probably just about the last thing you want to read about today (ranking just above your Aunt Mabel's hemorrhoids).

I'm sitting here watching a cardinal in the tree outside my window. He's a frenetic fellow, hopping from one branch to another. He stops occasionally to gobble down a few seeds, then he's off again. He reminds me of us.

Patience seems to be a lost art in our society. We are trained almost from our mothers' wombs to expect instant gratification. That's why we have f-a-s-t food when we eat out and microwaves when we eat in. Cooking a healthy, nutritious meal (one that doesn't come from a can or a box) takes time.

Of course, it isn't only food. Consider your television viewing habits. You click on a program and allow it maybe 15 seconds to grab your attention. If it doesn't, you're off channel-surfing, looking for something that will.

And what about relationships? Speed dating? Come on! What happened to getting to know a person, developing a rapport, establishing a friendship that just sort of slides into love? Got no time for that? Then how are you going to find the time to maintain the relationship if it ever happens?

But impatience can be its most debilitating when we become impatient with ourselves. Are you trying to make a positive change in your life? Maybe you're trying to lose weight or gain financial freedom. Maybe you're trying to break old habits or develop new insights. Whatever it is that you are doing in the way of self-improvement, impatience can only hamper your progress.

When you are already “down” on yourself and feeling the need to change, the last thing you need is to get “down” on yourself for changing too slowly. Impatience is a negative emotion that sets up negative vibes. It blinds you to any progress that you have made and, even worse, it makes you ungrateful.

Positive (another good P word) vibrations and gratitude will take you where you want to go if you just work at your goal and be patient with yourself. Poet Piet Hein put it this way:

“It ought to be plain
how little you gain
by getting excited
and vexed.
You'll always be late
for the previous train,
and always in time
for the next.”

That is, of course, if you actually go to the station. It is possible to have too much patience with yourself. Take the desire to lose weight (a recurring problem for moi). I want to lose weight. I need to lose weight. But I have trouble “getting to the station”.

That chocolate cake looks so good and, besides, exercise makes my ankle hurt. I'll just start my diet or my exercise program tomorrow. Or Monday. Monday's a good time to start things, first of the week and all. Or maybe I'll start at the first of the month. Let me see, it's August 5th now. I'll start my diet on September 1.

Well, you can see what happens if you're too patient with yourself: nothing. You might have a perfectly good goal in mind, but you keep putting off actually doing anything to achieve it. Your goal is so far in the future that you've lost sight of it.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said “Be patient, God isn't finished with me yet”. Perhaps we should revise and enlarge upon that:

Be patient, God isn't finished with you.
You're just getting started (again).
But it's up to you to get started.

A positive attitude, mixed with gratitude
will make it easier to start
on the way from what you want to what you get.

It's not exactly poetry but maybe it gets the point across. Have a great day!