Patience means that you already trust that it will happen.  I always imagined patience as something slightly manipulative.  Like there was this carrot at the end of a string with something I wanted that I would get if I could sit there and do what I was told long enough.  Honestly I HATED patience.  All the energy in my body demanded movement and flow and immediate action—the furthest thing from sitting there pretending to be willing to wait.  And what was even more irritating was seeing other people getting what I thought I would receive for doing the same thing they were.  What was I doing wrong?  Why wasn’t I worth what they were doing?  After all, I’d done the same thing if not more.  It felt like a constant test I was failing and something that existed to point out the inequity in life.  I mean, I’d done the time to earn things, and there were certainly people who had waited longer than me—so why couldn’t we get what those who had done less “earned”?  No, patience was not my friend. 

All of that puts patience as a reward based thing—we aren’t being patient because we are patient, we are patient because we think we will get something out of it.  The reality is, sometimes we have to be patient because there are different pieces falling into place.  Some of us are working on a 48 piece puzzle while others have a 4800 piece puzzle.  The latter takes longer to put together and may be more detailed.  Time is irrelevant and the things that are meant for us will find us in their time.  We can’t rush the timeline of our lives.  It isn’t about getting what is “due” to us, it’s about knowing it’s there and it will reveal itself at the right time.  Patience isn’t about the reward, it’s about our ability to focus the lens like we talked about and see what we are putting together.

To this day I am still not a patient person—I wake up and hit the ground running and constantly have an endless task list, and yes, I still want to get what I want now (because why wait, really?).  But hearing that viewpoint, that we trust it will happen on its own timeline, did change my perspective.  Patience isn’t about getting a thing or receiving a reward.  It’s knowing that life flows in its own rhythm and we are part of it. Living is the reward.  We get to do what we want while we are here and we can choose to fuss and fret over the things we lack or we can appreciate the beauty of life as it is and go with it.  We are here either way and we can choose our experience of it.  The longer we mope about how many pieces we have, the longer it takes to put it together.  Just do the work and all will come together when it’s meant to—it’s all there waiting for us to reveal it.