Patience, Patience, Patience, Practice, Practice, Practice

I have been telling people that my theme lately is patience.  As in I need some.

Its one thing to know what you are going through, and its another to get anywhere with it.  Sometimes you need to be patient while waiting for more patience to arrive. 

Its strange, this feeling I have of moving at hyperspeed and slow motion all at the same time.  I’ve been like this for months, but now that I have been like this for months its getting easier to switch my perspective between the two speeds.

A few weeks ago, I passed a milestone in my progress for patience and it came by looking in the mirror.  Sometimes the best mirror is another person.  I hadn’t seen my surf buddy D in a couple weeks and when we finally caught up, it was all talk about the new surf spot and the bigger waves and the effortless pop-ups, and the double wave rides into the sand.  Who was this person? A  week later it was discouragement and annoyance.  Its pretty easy to read her patience-with-surfing meter, its usually directly proportional to how long she stays in the water, and that sunday it was about half as long as she normally goes in, and the next tuesday?  Well, I’ll give her a pass. Sure I am dragging her over the coals here, but the point of this is that I was able to see pretty easily that we have both come a long way over this summer, and that a session or two or three or more of less than hoped for performance is a meaningless blip in the grand scheme. 

The light of the sun reflected off the mirror, blinding me for a sec. Oh, yeah.

Just because we can see where we want to be so clearly doesn’t mean we want to skip the getting there.  There is a LOT of joy in the journey.  I can imagine having lived an ideal life: there I am at the end, lying in a bed, old and white and feeling comfortable and happy and complete having lived a full life of integrity and adventure following my dreams, ready to move on as I take my last easy breath.  I DO NOT want to jump straight there!!!

Its so easy to get lost in the wrong time scale.

For surfing, which is something safe and easy for me to look at though my impatience extends FAR beyond sporting activities, there are other shifts in perspective that have been relevent. I found that once I had some really great rides, I stopped counting the trivial ones.  Not just that, but I stopped even trying for the little ones as much.  They used to be so much fun!  But now that I have had a taste of the good stuff, well, gimme, gimme, gimme, more, more, more!  But I am still transitioning, so it does me no good to ignore the fact that I have raised my standard…its going to take practice and time to make my new norm.

I did manage to make some inroads in my patience with my kids and what works there is to focus on love. When my kids are driving me nuts with attitude or some trivial thing they are arguing over, I just try and remember how much I love them.  It took a while, but that seems to help.  Its not like you can just decide to do adopt some new perspective or habit and then all of a sudden everything changes, but if you keep trying to do it, it actually makes a difference eventually — faith helps there.

Another technique that I am employing now with my impatience in relationships is to look at my attachments and desire.  I am so greedy!  I find something I like and I want more more more and as soon as I get something, its barely enjoyed before I am waiting for the next more more more.  When I get like, that I find that I am grasping and greedy over things that aren’t even real. If I imagine that what I desire doens’t exist anymore, suddenly I can see the parts that are real, and the greed and clinginess goes away. This is true for when I am waiting for some validation from a person I really like, or whether its a big wave I hope I’ll be riding.

When you let the right things go, you can carry so much more.

I lost my legs

I’ve been hanging out with this woman KD who was had to do some hard stuff in her life.  She’s not bitter or sad, and doesn’t whine or complain — quite the opposite.  She seems to enjoy her life and to make the best of it with integrity and purpose, taking a kind, positive view of her life and the people in it.  Her ten year old son suffered some brain damage when less than a year old and is developmentally disabled, requiring permanent assistance.  She has raised him and a daughter as a single mom for the last several years.  The internal foundation of loyalty and love that she has chosen to construct her life upon comes through quite clearly to me.  There is something very solid about her character that I admire.

The other day she shared a little bit about the problems of meeting other people who are scared of what she has to deal with.  I could see some pain and frustration.  She said, ‘He is my son, how can I do anything but care for him?’  She looked at me,  ’If you were married to someone and they lost their legs, would you leave them?’  Ahhh, now thats a question that resonated with me. I answered no pretty quickly.  I told her that I was a loyal person.   It had been something that I had thought about before, I saw it as a kind of defining question about what a marriage commitment was.  To me, the answer to the legless loyalty question was answered with the ‘I do’ of marriage, and that seemed right, even with my freshly muddled view of what marriage really means.

She responded the same but didn’t need to; her answer was obvious from the way she asked it.  But there wasn’t any question anyway, she had already followed through on it. She had made her choice and had proof of that kind of unconditional love and loyalty.

It made me wonder why so many marriages don’t survive.  How many people would leave their spouse if they lost their legs?  How many of those who say they would stay get divorced for more trivial reasons?

I wonder what I would do if I was married and I lost my legs and my wife stayed with me.  Would I have the strength to set her free? Would I have the strength to ask her to stay?

Thats not something I want to know the answer to.