Cultivating Patience, kind of

"Patience and fortitude conquer all things." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tcha! What does Ralph know? Okay, maybe he might be right, at least some of the time, but the simplicity of his statement makes it seem like a no-brainer. I consider myself to be on the greater side of patience, I can sit with a six year old and teach him to tie his shoelaces over and over and over again with humor and calm. But there are some times when it feels like having patience is to be superhuman, a feat reserved for the likes of comic book heroes, of whom, I am most certainly not. I'm a go-getter, generally speaking I make goals and I take the steps to accomplish those goals. But it's the times when it feels I have almost no control over either the process or the outcome that I'm most desperately impatient. I know, I know, it's called letting go. Tcha, again!

So Ralph isn't my cup of tea in this, what about:

"Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things - with resignations, yes but, above all, with blazing, serene hope." - Corazon Aquino

I think I can kind of get with Corazon on this one. He acknowledges that patience can sometimes hurt but he counters that hurt with hope. Hope fuels the will to keep the faith despite any bumps or bruises along the way. But hope can feel pretty dim as well every once in a while. How do you rebuild your hope? For me, sometimes, it can be as simple as cooking a meal. This might sound weird, but I really like chopping stuff. So today, I made a hand-chopped basil pesto. You might think this is time consuming and arduous. You would be right. But there's something about the total sanity in chopping the garlic, basil, and pine-nuts that brings a sense of peace and calm to my soul. There's a realness to making a meal - putting the ingredients together, timing things just right, cleaning as I go, tasting for seasoning, and realizing a final beautiful and scrumptious product to nourish my body and my senses. And all of a sudden I realize the anxiety I was holding seemed to melt away in my focus on the task at hand. Maybe now I'm in a better place to be able to see some hope and grasp at it with hesitation at first and tenacity in the end. At least, until next time.

Cultivating patience seems to be a never-ending pursuit. As soon as you feel you've achieved it, life throws another curve-ball at you that pokes, prods, and tests it. Either you choose to give in and give up or you pick yourself up off the floor, dust yourself off, tell the worries to shush, and do your darnedest to re-capture that elusive hope. Good luck friends, I'm right there with you.