I Am Patient

Am I a patient person?  Overall, I would say yes, I am patient.  There are times that I'm less patient, often with myself.  With other people I tend to have a lot of patience.  Being stopped on a highway?  Less patience.  Waiting in line, patient.

I wrote a while ago about expectations, and I think it is very pertinent to having patience.  There are certain things we do that we expect will take time, and others that we don't.  When I'm on the highway, I expect to go and not be stopped.  I know it can happen, and am frustrated when it inevitably does, doesn't change my daily expectation.  If I'm at the doctor's office, I expect to wait, even if I have an appointment, because I expect delays.  

When it comes to my training, I know that it's going to take me a while to reach my goal of earning my black belt, and even then, I realize that my journey doesn't end there.  That's my expectation, and thus, I have patience with my training.  Mostly.  I still get frustrated and impatient with myself and my progress.  This last year has been testing in that regard.  I train and train and beat my head against the proverbial wall and see little progress.  Part of me rationalizes and says to have patience and trust the process, and then there is the ego part of me that says what's taking so long.  

Part of having patience is trusting in the process.  It's trusting that all these small, incremental steps we take will eventually lead to something bigger and greater.  It's also about knowing that there will be times that we'll fall of the wagon, take some steps back, or get turned around all together.  To have patience in the journey requires us to surrender a bit of our pre-conceived expectations.  That's the hard part.  That is something that is hard to teach, usually it is something that is learned and reflected upon.

When we think about patience, we think about time.  The time we have, the time we spent, and what's left.  There's a bit of a paradigm surrounding time and patience.  When we're young we want to do things as quickly as possible, even though we still have lots of time left.  As we get older, we have less time, and yet, we become more patient.  Truth is, time is an illusion, and we don't necessarily have more when we're younger, or less when we're older.

Last note I want to leave off on, is what is the difference between being patient and procrastinating.  Those lines can be blurred.  Just because something isn't happening, that is tangible at least, doesn't mean that things are in the works.  I'm a firm believer in being patient with the universe and allowing things to fall into place for me.  Difference between this and just procrastinating, is that I'm mindful of this process.

Nigel Bauer