A Much-Needed Lesson in Patience

One of the places I find I am most lacking is patience.

Photo by Abbas Tehrani on Unsplash

I’ve struggled for years to build more patience into my life. I struggled because, to be blunt, I’m bad at it.

Sometimes this has served me well. Rather than simply awaiting a timely healing, when I was severely injured, I pushed. That push was borne from my impatience but wasn’t a lack of patience. It manifested instead into an unwillingness to accept anything but my vision of my healing.

The physical and occupational therapists I worked with loved me. Why? Because they could beat the tar out of me, push me harder and harder. Rather than the resistance or pushback they regularly got, from me it was demands for more. Conversations frequently went like this,

Therapist: Does that hurt? Therapist: Do you want to stop? Me: Nope. Keep going. Will hurt less next time.

I healed swiftly and completely because my inherent impatience got redirected and refocused into useful effort. This extended beyond the physical into the mental, emotional, and spiritual. It took far less time for me to heal completely — and more completely than expected — than they thought possible.

You would think that such a lesson in patience, and that amazing result, would take hold. Yet, no, in fact, it…