WHAT IF I TOLD YOU…

Unfortunately I am not always virtuous.

I remember when I was first sober and my sponsor told me that I needed to pray for patience.  Knowing that this man had experience and knowledge that I desperately needed I did not think twice about the suggestion and found myself on my knees nightly praying for patience with sincerity… something that had always been foreign and very uncomfortable for me.

Unfortunately it did not take long for me to realize that if one prays for patience, one ends up receiving situations in their life that they would need patience for.  That isn’t to say if you don’t pray for it there will be no situations… but it sure did seem that my focus ended up being in all the many things that were hard to handle and out of whack… and how little patience I had for all these situations at that time in my life.

In order to find the way to become a patient man… I had to learn what patience actually was…  and that, my friends, is a lesson that I may always be learning.  This would not be an admission to still being an impatient soul, for the most part I have learned valuable lessons about reactions to people, places and things and the inconsistencies of what I believe I want and what the world and my path seems to believe I should have.  The track between these two different factions of my world have grown closer over the years through simple maturity, practice, the breaking of old or creating of new habits and intense and magical focus, focus, focus.

The practice of patience is an exercise in breathing and awareness.  Both these aspects of the human experience have been a huge part of the growth I have wanted and achieved over the last couple of decades.  That does not make patience a given… not by a longshot.  Instead what it does is allow me to think about the need for the patience… take a deep breath and then refocus my energies elsewhere in order to do my best and stay in a moment rather than pushing ahead towards future where I “believe” what I want will be.  It may not be there.  It may never be there.  If it isn’t there it isn’t supposed to be.  If it is it will be worth the waiting and the patience will have served its purpose.

So what, you may ask, is the point behind blogging about patience?  Read anything I have been writing.  I am looking for and living in a world that is shrouded in desire for change.  Even though I am very much aware through everything I have EVER learned that the process of change is ongoing and whatever it is that I am going to experience will happen in its own time… not mine… I am still pushing myself out of the moments and into a place that isn’t necessarily real.

The only thing that is absolutely real is the moment I am in.  One might argue that the past is real… and I won’t debate that.  But I am one who tends to push myself forever onward and discards the past… not out of regret… not out of denial… but out of the simple fact that I am in classroom Earth and I want to continue to progress, not regress.  I like the thought of being able to reminisce… and I would be perfectly happy in a world that is filled with the music that I lived and enjoyed in the 80’s.  But if I am going to be progressing through this planet chronologically… I am going to advance myself in thought, mind and creativity as well.

Some days, however, I get a bit ahead of myself and I fail to enjoy and celebrate the points that I have been striving for that I have reached today.  The only thing I can do when I recognize this behavior is to stop, breath and remember:

patience is a virtue.

Be Happy.  Be Well.  Be.