On Waiting Well... and the impatience of 'the next thing'

I can still remember a time in my life when I used to experience a low level, but recurring frustration that things don’t happen to the timescale I have created for them. I may not have been conscious that’s what it was, and I may even have mis-interpreted it as ambition, or drive, or positive intent.

It’s none of those things though.

What’s obvious now is that timescale is figment of my imagination. I see that, mostly. And that I lived with an arrogance that “I” was somehow in control, even directing, the things i wanted to happen. Oh what an illusion. But not an uncommon one I suspect?

The quiet niggle that I need to do more, I need to press on, I need to go faster, that someone, or something else is wrong because they don’t seem to be working to my priorities.

Familiar perhaps? It can sound righteous when we say it out loud, like not doing is a laziness, or a waste of talent and gifts, rather than what looks more true to me now—that it’s a reality check, and that there is no way that more interference from me will help the world turn on its axis.

I catch it quickly now, and laugh, remembering that “I” don’t set the timescale; that “I” can do what I can do and the rest takes as long as it takes; that it’s perfectly OK to do more if more suggests itself to be done, but the striving because it seemed like the future could be better if I made it so, is a myth so many of us live in.

And that waiting well is the art from which life is made, as John Lennon said.

Kinda anyway ;-)

“Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.“

With love,

Cathy