[01-06-26] Patience
If patience is a virtue, than I was born wicked. Everything I do seems to ooze a sort of hurriedness.
I am so impatient for life to move quickly that I often get in my own way and life moves slower. Always I am moving people on as soon as I feel they are ready, instead of letting them breathe. I am too impatient to let tensions simmer and boil. All of my loves quickly become deep loves.
I can’t help but feel that I have managed to achieved much in life, in part, due to this impatience. As of late, I am feeling that now I am achieving in spite of it. It prompts me to wonder where this hurriedness first took its root? I remember always wanting things to move faster than they were willing to, even when those things were people with thoughts and feelings. I have never been one to mince words, I’ve always wanted what was immediate and true.
Part of this impatience comes from a terror of death; if I only have so many seconds on this Earth, its best to use every second as efficiently as possible. Why wait the few vague seconds for the silent, knowing agreement between companions, best to move things along myself, definitively. I feel I know things before other people and I know them because I am always dialed into an awareness of what needs to happen next, my state of being is an awareness a few seconds into the future.
I am rarely anxious about what will happen next week or next month, but what happens in the next 5 minutes is of paramount importance for whatever reason.
I do think the impatience stems from a sort of desire to dominate my future, to guide my destiny and to prevent the “second death” of being forgotten. If I can just move forward as fast as possible, I think to myself, I can achieve much and then I will be remembered for those achievements. However, and especially, when those achievements dependent on others things will move only as fast as they will move and no faster.
Let a situation breathe, give people a second, relinquish control: these are all changes I should practice. I am so hyper aware of any lull or immediate next need that I am suffocating social situations with a sort of foreboding. My ability to predict what comes next makes it difficult for people to come along with me or to guide me elsewhere.
In reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, one of the central takeaways for me is learning to love the process of doing the work. The pushing of the boulder is the sole joy in this absurd life. I must learn to love the process of waiting, asking this of my unyielding spirit: this is my boulder.
In trying to look smart, I look dumb. In fearing not being recognized for my shrewdness, I make my shrewdness a club which I bash others over the head with. Paradoxically, being focused on the top of the hill makes it more difficult to get to the top of the hill.
More than anything, I am prideful. I submit to no man and no God. I am unyielding and in my unyielding I prevent myself from tasting life and feeling its depth. I hear the call to resign myself and am emboldened to carry forward with a sort of blind stubbornness. But, alas, I am tired. My unyielding spirit is succeeding only in crafting a life half-lived and hurried along. By resigning to none, I have resigned to all.
What I am chasing cannot be seized, it can only be received. And to receive, I must first stop reaching. My hands are always grasping forward, never open, never still. I have rushed past moments in my hurry to reach the next. Conversations ended, silences filled. I want so badly to be remembered that I forget to be present and I’m beginning to suspect that presence is the only thing worth being remembered for.
My sister once said of me “of course he’ll do it, he’ll just complain the whole time,” I find myself constantly reliving this truth. I am struggling to be where I am without reaching for what comes next.