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Key points
- Patience, like waiting, can be active and productive.
- Creative focus and flow can be harnessed in increments to prevent depletion and burnout.
- Patience and forethought in relationship formation can help identify what one needs and wants.
- Cultural icons from childhood can shape one's expectations and reactions; being mindful of their meaning can provide unexpected insight.
I’ve just been through a rough time: After the death of a dear friend, my vulnerability led me into an intense, painful, and mercifully brief relationship that left me disillusioned and mistrustful.
I’m tamped down for the moment. I realize that I simply need to wait for grief to do its work and incorporate Tara’s death into my life; therapy and writing to make meaning out of my foray into what I learned was a “dalliance;” and my spirit to regain its hope and faith, joy and love.
To wait. Patience has never been my strength. My mother called me impulsive. I do tend toward action more than rumination. Not always the best option, action—as recent events showed me—and now I have decided to learn to wait. To be patient. To let important things in my life—a shift in my career, a primary relationship—unfold over time.
The Details of Good Habit Formation
Four months into this process of waiting, I’ve worked out a method for the shift in career. I don’t know if it will continue to work for me, but right now, it’s exactly right. I wake up and make a cup of coffee. I go to my study, light a candle, say a prayer for the people on my mind. And then I write a little section of the essay I’m working on, anywhere from 500-750 words. I like writing in sections: something small enough to achieve, large enough to produce something to revise. I write something every day to maintain the habit and that regularity preserves the creative flow and steady production of material. New habit formation requires me to write every day at the same time too, so the clock reinforces the practice. For me, the best time is first thing in the morning before other duties interfere or I am otherwise distracted.
The practice I am strengthening these dark winter mornings requires regularity and patience, an organic process of growth and accumulation. If I write a bit, patiently each day, I not only love the process of writing (which makes me want to keep doing it), but I also avoid being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. I have energy and enthusiasm for the project left over each morning when I leave my desk. As in so many aspects of life, the incremental approach nourishes me rather than depleting me.
Patience and Anxiety
So, what about my love life? Can I cultivate patience there? Or am I procrastinating, too anxious to move forward?
My husband died eight-and-a-half years ago. I have male friends, the guys in my poker group, men at church, people I knew in school years ago and text with occasionally. But none of that is my primary relationship.
I’m anxious about dating: Is online really the only way to meet prospective partners? One woman I know is happily married to a man she met through a modern-day matchmaker: Could that work? I might feel a little safer with a businessperson negotiating for me, but the financial cost and the transactional vibe don’t appeal to my romantic and individualistic self. I could try a platform (which?), set up a profile (ugh!), see who clicks on me (eek!), and whether I want to go to the next scary step of seeing if we click “with” each other in real-time (argh!) But even as I type that possibility, my muscles tighten, and all internal signs are indicating “flight!” I don’t write a profile, don’t look at the matchmaker’s website. I don’t do anything.
I’m not being patient. I’m not waiting. I’m simply procrastinating.
What if I wait for relationship in the way that I have started waiting for the shift in my career, by working on it in increments, in small, gratifying ways? What would it look like to actively wait for relationship?
Active Waiting
True confession: Writing those questions causes a childhood song to burst into my brain. The soaring melody of “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
When I look up the lyrics from Disney's Snow White, I learn a bit about the ideas of romance that shaped me as a little girl. Snow White’s waiting is much more active than I consciously recall. She declares that she knows that “I’ll find my love…. [My] my heart will start skipping a beat….” And then together, “We'll say and do things we've been longing to…. We’ll find our love anew…when my dreams come true.”
Can Snow White be a 59-year-old widow’s model for romance? As I enter an active process of cultivating patience, waiting for love until I am ready to meet it, I want to be confident like Snow White, sure that I’ll find a prince. Like her, I want to have a holistic response: body, mind, and spirit join to affirm it’s love. Snow White knows she and her prince will need to focus on the relationship, and in doing so find happiness. And she’s aware that the love will change with time as her current dreams come to fruition. Am I up for that whole package? Will I be able to shift my focus? Will I be able to adapt to love changing with time? With age?
I think about myself at 5 years old lying on the floor and listening to the album of Snow White. I see myself through the years, repeatedly thinking I’ve found Prince Charming, and actually being right a time or two. Here I am again, actively waiting to find and honor the gift of love.
That’s what we do, right? We look for love all our lives. Sometimes we are impatient, as I was recently, and get hurt. But if we take incremental steps toward real love in our work and our relationships—if we identify our longing, express ourselves honestly, visualize fulfillment—like Snow White, we will find love anew.
