It occurred to me the other day, I have been an impatience person the whole of my life. This is not a new thought, anyone who knows me, knows that waiting is not my best skill. In fact, annoyance rapidly comes whenever I am asked to wait for anything. I still maintain that being born 23 days after my due date, completely fucked up my whole relationship with time and I have been trying to catch up ever since. So perhaps some variation of that is operating in the background of my life all the time.
It is like I was born with this default setting of how long I should be asked to wait...in traffic, in line, for things I want, for things I don’t. And if I am pushed, through circumstances, to wait longer than my default setting allows, the result is annoyance. And right after the annoyance hits, so does my call to action. I am better than I used to be - waiting just caused me to be pissed the fuck off. I would get so mad, like I was this very important person that was now being waylaid and heads would roll. Which is really funny because most of the time I walk around not feeling like I have any right to be somewhere at all. So the fact that I feel like everyone should hurry up to accommodate me is incongruent with how I feel and live.
For the most part, I think I want to walk through the world, with my life really not having much of an impact on others. And vice versa. I think I mostly like being left alone and to grant others the same passage. COVID only made this tendency within myself worse. I can be friendly and outgoing but the older I get, the less I am interested in the outside world and their stuff, and the more interested I become in this inner life I have and cherish. I know, its fucked up, but that is truth.
But that is a story for tomorrow perhaps. Today my focus is seeing how much my impatience has caused me and others to suffer. Not just when I get restless and bitchy having to wait in the never ending Rite Aid pharmacy line. I swear to God, that place has a line no matter the time of day, week or year. I am not sure why...on some level I feel for the staff there - I mean they never get a break, like ever!
So impatience has robbed me of my peace of mind and when it is allowed to unfurl, unchecked, then it robs others of their peace of mind too. I have gotten better at not being a total ass about it (most of the time) but there are still times when I act out and then have to go back and own my shit. Not a favorite of mine, so for the most part, I have learned to just keep my irritation and impatience quiet and non-wreckage producing.
Impatience has also brought me a great many relationships that I would have likely been better off without. Dating and loving has been greatly hampered by my impatience. I mean so far my results in this department are not all that great. And I don’t mean that about the people I have dated...I have made some good choices of some good people over the years (and I can also own, I have made some very poor choices). But what I can see, really clearly and quite painfully, is how much my own impatience got me into some things that if I could have just waited a little longer, I would have seen the dumpster fire that was about to ignite. But I couldn’t wait. I just had to jump in, allow my impulsiveness and all the good feels that are part and parcel to a new love affair to dictate that waiting is sidelined and all I see are green lights all round.
So in today’s assessment of my relationship with impatience, it has been pretty much a lose/lose proposition. It brings irritation and sometimes down right anger, it brings relationships into my life that are NEVER going to be what I need or want them to be...repeatedly. It takes my peace of mind and my inner calm. On this most recent assessment, impatience fucks me over going or coming, every time.
I have been trying to think of something good gained through my experience with impatience...and so far the only thing that I can come up with is that not waiting has caused me to have to learn to wait which is revolutionizing my life currently. I am waiting. I am feeling somewhat impatient about it but I so lack street cred, even with myself, that I am somewhat terrified to take any action at all where relationships are concerned. I have chosen so poorly, repeatedly that I now doubt myself into inaction.
I think the biggest and hardest realization for me as of late, is that my own impatience has caused me to suffer so greatly. And I can now see that it is the great undercurrent in the blockage of universal will operating in my life. Universal will takes too fucking long, which is what spurs me into action every single time and there I go again off on another self directed and badly timed crisis. Of course, I never see it that way at the time.
What impatience has taught me recently is that my own inability to wait, to hold still, to sit idle has really been the harbinger of pain. When I can’t wait, won’t wait, I cause people, places and things that are likely not meant for me to be pulled into my orbit. If I could wait, then perhaps that whatever the fuck is going to happen, might happen to someone else. But it is like my inability to wait causes me to force myself to the front of the shitshow line every single fucking time. I am very tired of the continued servings of shit that I seem unable to avoid, which I now see as totally due to my own impatience.
So I see, perhaps for the first time, that a great deal of hardship in my life has been caused because I am unwilling to wait. And I supposed all those lessons I needed to learn because I did, well I did because I didn’t. I had to have them repeatedly to have the thought yesterday, walking into my therapist’s office, that impatience brings shit into my life while it is also taking things from my life. And until yesterday I never fucking saw it that way at all.
It is funny...I feel like I have been doing a much better job waiting lately. I don’t like it and think that the universe has her timeline all wrong...but despite this feeling, I am still sitting in the gap and have found some level of acceptance about it.
I am hopeful that perhaps my willingness to be more patience will bring some new things to my life and stop taking so much. That perhaps this new way of living, this waiting for things meant for me will enlargen my spiritual development and life. Perhaps I will not be very successful at all and will just go back to being the impatient ass that I have always been. Honestly, my money is on the later more than the former. But this new skill of sitting with things, of allowing things to just unfold feels uncomfortably comfortable. It is new, for sure, but it is developing and I can feel it settling in for me.
Sometimes, I feel like Pac Man. Like I am just locked in this fucking game where all I do is run around consuming: people, food, events, things, experiences and it is all a time of the essence thing. I find myself wondering if there isn’t more to life than being locked in a screen where I am forced to mindlessly consume over and over and over again. And even as I write this, I wonder if I can ever be anything else. Clearly, the human being experience has been sidelined and a bit derailed and deranged because of my own impatience and this default belief system where I am the person totally in charge of my life.
I mean if Pac Man waits, he is fucking dead. And he gets three lives, I do not...at least not that I am aware.
If impatience brings me things I do not really want and takes the things I do, perhaps patience can reverse this trend and provide a more stable and satisfying basis for living...
I can’t say again, still, because this is whole new territory for me.
Again, still.
