I know a lot of patient people, and I am not one of them--at least that is not my natural inclination. I could write a list of all the people I know who tend to be naturally comfortable in waiting, beginning with my mother. It's a double-sided quality, useful, good for those who are consistent and tenacious, mature, generous, accepting and generally calm.
Patience is a skill I have had to learn over and over again. To be professional in my work, I cannot choose to be otherwise. It is an exercise in restraint with other people, despite how wrong, outrageous or petty I may think a situation is. Writing calls for a different kind of patience--the tenacity to start an engine, keep it going and drive somewhere without a map if you want to say anything worth saying. Then there is the matter of completion; one cannot be too patient to actually bring a project to its close.
Then there is the patience required in waiting for an outcome. This is probably my greatest challenge because outcomes are never immediate, may not be clear when they do happen, or may not make themselves apparent at all until long after something has been accomplished.
My father's general inclination is not to be patient about certain things--fixing a problem, addressing a situation that needs attention, and so on. I think these are positive qualities because at the age of 77, he is always doing something. There is a certain tenacity in that. This is what confuses me about patience.
I have more I'd like to say about this confusion and maybe shouldn't even post such an incomplete set of thoughts, but maybe that's the point. I wonder about how others are inclined to think where patience is concerned and what matters most to be patient about. So maybe I'll leave this question hanging. . . hmmmmm.
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Ventures into virtual land
I admit I am a techno dinosaur. My laptop is slow and low on memory space. Maybe these first two lines parallel mid-life. Both of my daughters have recently married in the last two years. I am at odds with myself and contented at the same time. Is that possible? I began this blog in a technology boot camp that was our faculty retreat just days before the halls of our new building were filled with cute boots that college girls wear and the sounds of cellular equipment dinging, vibrating and rapping. Within the span of two years, I turned fifty, traveled to Africa, accepted a position as Associate Dean of a brand new School of Communication that had long roots in a small department I have been part of for eighteen years at an institution I love. I became a grandmother of a little girl, deployed thirty five students to mentor young girls, women and migrants from faraway places out of one of my classes, and traveled to two different states to stand in my role as proud mother of the bride. Alone. Their weddings were as perfect as my daughters are different. I cried unbridled tears at the ceremony where I felt like I was revisiting my former life with their father's family and loving them all, healing from an ancient divorce and regretting the unfinished business I have with the bride. The second ceremony signaled a "coming out" of shyness I had never seen in my younger daughter. I have not been successful in love, though I have loved and been loved; yet both of these beautiful young women, my daughters appear to have found their life's mates. I wish I could take credit for that, but I have no idea if any is mine and am grateful for their good judgement. My insides moved at the second wedding from fatigue, joy, a sense of completion, and overwhelming sentimentality at the simultaneous sight of watching my eldest nurse her baby, worry about a baby girl's fusses while cutting new teeth, and my youngest's embracing of her big, beautiful day that she had worked months to deploy with a budget spreadsheet, delegation of roles to aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and her truest friends. I spent that day in two places very far away from each other--ecstasy and longing. I celebrated a beautiful couple's joy, likeness, practicality and sense of humor, watched my parents who are in their seventies dance for perhaps the first time in fifteen years. They came alive as if they had not suffered the loss of many dear friends over the past few years; they looked young and as I remember them loving each other in sweet and funny ways throughout my growing years.I felt the loss of my importance in each daughter's life as I watched my eldest fulfill her role as wife and mother, nursing her baby girl, feeling those early pangs of watching your daughter suffer, even if only from cutting new teeth. I felt like a woman cutting new teeth in suffrage and liberation at once. I was far away from my home in Chicago and close to the home of all that I knew as a child and young mother stranded between the whole of what I thought I might do with my life's future over five decades. I have failed miserably in some things and reached heights I never knew I was capable of. I finished a book manuscript over the summer that took me eleven years to write through the trials of tenure, raising teenage daughters and managing parts of my life that always seemed like bikes and ropes and water and steam that I tried to hold onto, but could never fully grasp.
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