Patience

My husband tells me that I am impatient. I don’t know where he gets that idea from. (I’m kidding about that.) When I get something in my head I can be pretty single-minded until I’ve made it happen. That ability to focus has served me well many times, but it can also limit my ability to create good things if I get too intent on one single outcome.

The more years I spend on this earth, the more I realize the importance of letting go, to allow space for the as-yet-unseen possibilities that are part of perfect and divine order to come in to my life. I appreciate the value of being single-minded in envisioning that my life is created for good, but I can be more flexible about just how that good is going to come about. Surely I have some ideas about how I’d like to experience my life, but the quiet voice of the God within me whispers of truths that I just don’t hear when I’m heaven-bent on trying to control my path.

I love the writings of Jon Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness. In his book, “Wherever You Go There You Are,” in a chapter on patience, he says that “patience is remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself.” The seasons of our lives will also come, and we will grow toward the light as we must.

Ultimately, I know that there is no need to hurry things. One of my favorite sayings to remember is that the outcome is never in question. We are going to end up where we need to be. I have found that whether I choose to spend my time striving and wanting, or in deciding and then letting it be, the outcome is the same either way. How I feel getting there is very different, though. I’d rather let the “getting there” be done in an energy of peace, and in openness to the miracles that spirit can create when I get out of my own way.

I came upon Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, which was quoted in Kabat-Zinn’s book:

“I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that
is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand
or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness,
I can wait.”

Eternity is a very long time.  The divine intelligence that lives as us calls forth our best, at the perfect time and in the perfect way.

May this tool be a blessing. . .