Patience is a Virtue: In my opinion, it is more of an ongoing practice
That is what my mother always told me when I was a kid, often enough that it stuck with me. As I got older the reply to that comment, in my head at least, was “that I do not possess.”
Apparently, when I was about 2 years old and my younger my sister was 6 months old, she was in the playpen and kept crying. My mom was out of the room but came back in time to see me whop my sister on the head. Even at that young age, I had no “patience” for crying.
Through the years I was the person who got annoyed when it took forever in the check-out line at the grocery store. Waiting for anything, anywhere used to piss me off. I sort of had a short fuse in general.
The thought of having a child made me nervous, would I be patient enough not to get mad at any given point? Well, I was gifted a child who pushed my buttons all the time. I did my best to stay calm, and not get mad when she was up in the middle of the night. Things that test even the most patient person.
Now have almost unending patience at the grocery store, if you are in front of me and want to go back and get something you forgot or you cannot find your debit card, I have all day. I no longer have any road rage. What changed? Meditation. That one simple practice changed me. Meditation is a whole other blog post of its own, but the practice gave me what I needed, a way to quiet my mind and it also calmed my body. What started on the meditation pillow in the morning started to flow into my whole life. I began to see that being impatient was not getting me anywhere, it did not make things happen any faster, and being impatient was upsetting my nervous system. Slowly, I became more present (being ok in whatever the moment held for me) and much less reactive to everything that came my way.
Then came a grandchild (Zoe.)
After Zoe was born, she and my daughter were coming into the office a few days a week. I found that this rattled my nervous system. I was on edge and irritable the whole time they were there and relieved when they left. That was not what I wanted from the time they were here! The whole time they were there I was thinking of the work I could/should or would be doing if they were not in the office. Plus, Zoe would get cranky because no matter how hard we tried, she could not sleep in the office. Finally, after about 6 months I had a shift or a realization…….what I needed to do was to just STOP everything that I was doing while they were there and just be with them. Not think about what I needed to do or what I should be doing. Just be present with Zoe. Sit on the floor, and play.
This was not easy; I am used to doing things all the time, moving. But it’s working, now I sit on the floor and give Zoe my undivided attention. And when they leave, I am nothing but sad, not relieved.