*9 women can’t make a baby in a month
*I’m dancing as fast as I can
*Patience is a virtue
*A watched pot never boils
We have a lot of ways to say that it takes however long it takes to get the end result. That doesn’t make it any easier on us or make us deal with it any better. In fact, we are pro at getting in our own way, acting in our worst interest, and slowing things up due to our impatience. Like small children on December 10th crying ourselves until we throw up because we can’t get Christmas to arrive any faster, we fret and stew and tantrum around what we want while the world, for the most part, ignores us and keeps right on chugging.
The most common reaction I see is “pushing.” Things aren’t going as fast as we want them to and this makes us anxious and afraid and before we get spun out of control we take all that energy and push it into a frenzy of doing. We make things, contact people, post things, blog, drive…we are a Tasmanian Devil of efficiency. We hope that all of this will goose things into going faster, which it almost never does, and that it will make things fall back into line, which it doesn’t. What it does is wear us out, put new things in motion, and therefore we feel better. After we’re spent we get to evaluate with our newly leveled head whether what we made is a mess we have to clean up or a brilliant new project we now get the benefits of.
The other reaction I see pretty often is “The Sky Is Falling.” This is what happens when something isn’t going fast enough or there is a little hiccup in the process and this sends the person into a tailspin of apocalyptic proportions. The flailing starts happening where they point to this and say that their life is over, the entire endeavor is a failure, the world is ending, they have no recourse but to stop and walk away, they will be penniless and out on the street and do you have a couch they can surf on? *sigh* Of course, once they drown their sorrows, have a fit and fall in it, go outside and stand under the falling sky for a while, they will climb down out of their hysteria tree and see that everything is exactly as it was before with some extra details added. Everything perking along just fine, thank you very much.
Patience is a virtue. It’s not something to force on yourself, it’s something to cultivate. Feelings are natural, normal, and appropriate. They shouldn’t be forced away or forced into being. They should be indicators, signs pointing the way to something important. Fears of this kind, the out of perspective, over reactionary kind, point not to problems outside in the world, but things that need to be healed inside. Healing the internal hurts will help the reactions go away and make being patient and virtuous a breeze. (or at least tolerable. Nobody likes watching paint dry no matter how virtuous they are…)
