Are You Patient or Just Acting that Way?

Sitting at my computer with coffee still in my cup, I scrounged for a good title, telling myself all the while to just chill. You’ll probably change it anyway. That’s true, but I need to name the file so I can save it as I write. I’m starting with “Patience: the Forgotten Virtue,” which creates some early morning irony, I guess.

I read very few pages this morning. It’s becoming a problem. My mornings are supposed to be spent in my reading nest on the chaise part of the orange leather sectional in the family room. I am supposed to sit there, reading, thinking, and writing my way through two cups of coffee and beyond. On a good morning, I can make progress in about half-a-dozen books. But here I am today, at my computer, with fingers flying. Nearly the same thing happened yesterday. The problem is the books I’m reading. They simply have too much to say to me.

About a week ago, I took The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller back off the shelf. It’s the first Miller book I read, and I am amazed by all that I missed the first time around, but then again, this was new territory for me a year and a half ago. Important books need to be read at least twice, probably more than that. You’ll hone in on particular words, sentences, and themes depending upon where you are in life. My first reading of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae in 2020 was completely different from my second reading this past year, and it took me less than a chapter in a third go-round/review to realize that I had changed enough in the interim to realize that while Paglia has a great deal of insight to offer in the dysfunctional society we all inhabit, she is working with unquestioned starting points that I have examined and found wanting, so the page flags came out and the book finally went back on the shelf.

So now, I am starting my day with a paragraph (yes, only one paragraph, at least through the introduction) of The Body Never Lies, and then I move on to the next chapter of What My Bones Know. I glommed onto so much in those books today, there was little mental space left for anything else. But that’s okay. In fact, it’s great. It tells me that patience is finally and truly becoming part of me. In the past, I humored myself with statements like, “Well, if nothing else, parenthood has taught me patience.” Was it true? Not really. It was more a giving up because there was nothing else I could do. Now, however, I see the absolute beauty in a slow life, a life of enjoying the present because the future will take care of itself. Yes, yes, I’ve read such statements a million times before, and over and over, I had convinced myself that I believed it, but it wasn’t true. You can will something all you want, but that doesn’t mean it will ever be true.

How many times in the Catholic universe have I read some variation of “love is a choice” and told myself, yes, that’s true? Well, I’ve got news for you, it’s not. Love cannot be willed. It is there or it isn’t, just like belief. We can force ourselves to act lovingly, to modulate our tone of voice so that the annoyance almost doesn’t come through when dealing with a difficult family member, but that’s not creating love; that’s persevering. Wouldn’t it be better to try and figure out what is sabotaging the love we once felt? Why this person we claim to love is bugging the shit out of us most of the time? Wouldn’t it be better to try and figure out how this dysfunctional dynamic began? As I find myself saying over and over, you cannot solve a problem if you don’t know what the problem is. You can treat symptoms till the cows come home (maybe by convincing yourself that love is a choice and acting accordingly), but symptom elimination is seldom a cure.

So, I’m working and waiting, and when I find myself thinking, this needs to be addressed now, I take a breath or take a walk and I trust. The right answer will eventually show up, but even better, in the meantime, the right questions will.