Patience

I have wonderful clients who often say affirming things to me.  Recently one said, "Karen is my model for patience."  It startled me. Patience is not a trait I think of related to myself, and yet I can see why she sees it.  She's known me as a consultant, a facilitator, a holder of space. In that role, patience is required, so it is a thing that I do.

More specifically, it is a thing that I have learned to do, a skill I can put on like a part of a uniform to do the work that I do. It is not an innate part of my personality. I wasn't born patient. I arrived in the world passionate, demanding, insistent and stubborn, determined that the truth be told, that action follow truth, that the right thing be done. 

Over years, through painful lessons, I came to understand that the right thing isn't always the best thing, that truth is elusive and chameleon. Truth is individual and joint at the same time. I discovered that caring for people is far more about hearing them and honoring their truth than it is about decisively taking action toward the thing I think they need. 

I learned that living my truth, acting on my passion, means slowing down, holding space, and connecting. It means honoring the other - both the other person and their otherness. There are many skills required.  One of them is patience. 

It isn't patience as I understood it in childhood: the passive act of waiting peacefully. My patience is an action of staying present for what is, for as long as it takes, without trying to make it something else.  

Active patience, it turns out, is hard work. And I'm tired. Grief is exhausting. Feeling the loss of him is excruciating. Not feeling it is debilitating. Whether I'm sobbing my way through a tissue box or pushing down the lump in my throat or diving into a distraction, the cost of grief is there. It is the first draw on my energy, already spent. 

I don't feel patient. I remember when I wore patience day in and day out. It was a skill I had used by intention long enough for it to become a habit. It became a part of me. Then my world shattered and habits ceased to have any hold. I miss the ease of patience, the confidence that I could hold it.

I don't have that capacity any more. The skill remains and I can hold it for a while. And then I can't. I snap. I gnash out my frustrations. I bemoan a world in which people resist the very things that I know could give them what they want. I vent my frustrations in safe places and sometimes foolish ones, because patience is work and I'm simply too tired to do it.  

The cost of grief is paid in many currencies. One of them is patience.