As I touched on in my previous post, my goal for this new year is to find more ways to write to not only communicate better and more effectively, but also to reflect on this year and in the years to come.
Today, I wanted to talk about the concept of patience. Often, we want things to happen when we want them to happen. And, when they don’t occur, we can find ourselves shifting into a space of judging ourselves in a negative way. This is often the case in today’s world where everything is just so damn immediate. Case in point, when I was young, Saturday morning cartoons were a weekly ritual. I would wake up at 7am with no alarm clock or phone setting, but just this sense that cartoons were starting and I needed to be in front of my television with a bowl of cereal or a couple pop tarts in hand ready for the programming to begin. There wasn’t a DVR, on demand service, or even a rewind function on the television. If you missed a part of the program — well, you just missed it. There would be a re-airing of the program at a later point (usually in the summer), but that would often be months down the road — and, who wants to wait for that? I remember one Fall, my brother in-law came to visit my wife and I in Chicago with his children and I remember them wanting to watch a program that had come on months ago. They were able to just go through the cable on-demand library and find the exact episode and watch it uninterrupted and at their own leisure. While I wasn’t in awe like some kid watching a magician make a rabbit come out of his hat, I did think about it in contrast to how I watched cartoons as a kid. That the ritual and behaviors that I had to use were no longer necessary.
My point is this, with technology providing so much immediate gratification, its sometimes difficult to practice patience. That means we must be intentional in our means of finding ways to practice patience. The same applies for our new year’s resolutions. We may want for these things to come to fruition right away, but sometimes we need to have some patience and allow the journey to unfold in its own time. That’s where mindfulness allows us to notice when we are in that space of impatience and to re -center ourselves so that we can get back or shift into a space of patience. I’m a big candles and hand soap person, so holding off on purchasing them to a later time is helpful. Or, staying on schedule of my runs during training season and not running whenever I want to run is patience in practice.
Thanks for reading! Hope to share with you again soon.
