I need patience. Now!

This morning I said to myself, “Take a deep breath.  Another.  And another.  Take a second to catch that time between the match and the fuse. ”

I have always struggled with having (or not having) patience.  We are told it’s a virtue.  It’s a wonderful trait to have! Ugh.  I used to pray for it.  (Really?  By some magic gift, God would provide me with this,  without me working on it?) How many of us have looked up and yelled, Give Me Patience!

In the family I live in, we all struggle with not having patience.  This can make life extremely difficult as you can imagine.  Impatience lurks in all the dark corners of our minds.  We want things to go right, we want things to happen now, not later, we want results now, and we want everyone else to abide by these rules.  During this time of home and social isolation, it’s even harder to manage.  That impatience is always just bubbling under the surface.

I am home with Ryan quite a bit of the time.  We are in each others way.  We both have our own way  of doing things.  Our independence and old ways of life before the virus no longer exist.  We have to coexist with each other during the day.  He doing his schoolwork for college., and me doing work, or cleaning, or writing.  We interrupt each other on a semi regular basis.  And it never seems to be a good time for interrupting.  More often than not, without thinking, we yell at the other for not paying attention to what the other is doing.  We have no patience for each other.  And with Ryan’s learning differences, I need to show extra patience.  His world has turned upside down.  I need to work on patience more now than ever and be accepting more of his actions.

On top of this, I have little patience for the length of time this homeboundness is lasting.  (I know, not a real word) When will it end?  I’m going crazy here!  If something doesn’t give soon, I don’t know what I’m going to do!  Patience, I keep telling myself, patience!

So what to do?  I am practicing  diligently to become more patient.  At the beginning of this post, I mentioned the space of time between the match and the fuse.  The moment between when something happens, to the moment I open my mouth, or internally scream.  The time I will ask myself, how am I going to react?  How important is it?  I ask myself, do I want to cause myself to suffer, or others to suffer when I speak harshly?  Or do I want to cause myself to suffer when I become impatient with traffic, or any other time when I’m faced with something that isn’t going how I expect it to go? I try to find that space, to slow down time, so that I can give myself a moment to choose how I’m going to act or react.

The focus for working on patience is all on me, not on who or what is the object of my impatience.  The physical and mental suffering cause by impatience should be enough to get me to work on changing.  I can not change others, I can only change myself.  Sometimes I am extremely hard on myself and I cry over my inability to be a better mother or wife.  But then, I come back around and realize that I am only human and that it is in the practicing and awareness of my behavior that I can slowly but surely change.  And I vow never to look up to the heavens again and yell “Give me patience!”