moodybreadcrumbs

The thread that ties every season of my life together is the lesson of patience. It was unfortunate to grow up in an age when we were raised in part by TV shows, sitcoms and movies that operated at a pace that was not reflective of reality. I don’t even want to think about most recent generations, social media and the ever shortening videos for ever shortening attention spans. I can only speak from my experience and I can say the timelines of movies and TV shows have done me a huge disservice. Maybe it was amplified because of my extra sensitive nature but I have always, always, felt a huge gap between what the timeline of my life should be and how it feels versus what the natural pace of life actually is. People say the years are fast and time flies, and that’s true to some extent as far as our perception goes. But especially during those times of struggle or those in between times when there’s something we really want with our whole heart. It’s during those times that time slows and we are asked (forced) to be patient and wait. It’s those times when we can’t move on to the next scene when we want to, we can’t gloss over the perception of time passing. We are designed to endure. We are instructed to live in the thick of it, to take one step at a time, to take one day at a time and to wait. I’ve never had a lesson come back and haunt me so many times in my life. Just when I think the dreams I’ve had are finally on my doorstep, finally about to come into fruition, time stops. And it’s my own fault because once I see a glimmer of that dream coming into reality, I speed up. Instead of staying in the present and enjoying what is coming, I project 10 steps ahead. That’s when it slips through my fingers. The universe tells me time and time again to be still, to wait, to be patient, the right thing will come. Yet I try to take hold of what comes into my life that seems even remotely close to the right thing, at least I try to. It’s that desperate longing, the anxiety, the anticipation – all of those things move me from my stillness. I become a leaf being tossed about by the fleeting gusts of wind, when instead, I need to remain settled on the ground, settled within myself. It’s unfortunate, really, that I can’t learn this lesson. It feels like a perpetual cycle that I’ll never be able to overcome – like I’ll never be about to keep my excitement and anticipation contained. The only way I can think to do that is to numb myself and I don’t want to live like that.

The point of this is we’re forced to act out a pace that is not natural to us. We’ve been programmed from very young ages to overload ourselves and move quickly. That’s not how humans were designed. We were designed to follow the pace of nature, its natural rhythm. And that pace is slow. It’s time to watch a sunrise, to watch the stars for an hour after dinner and before bedtime. It’s laying in the grass and staring up at the sky, creating stories about the clouds and the heavens above. But even in our age of technology, when it comes to our human nature, even those things still take time, longer than we think. It takes time to build trust, it takes time for friendship to bloom, it takes time for people to serendipitously be at the same place at the same time, strike up a conversation and build rapport. It takes time to breed familiarity and establish bonds. We still move at the pace of nature in more respects than we’re aware. Human nature and interactions still require a great deal of time, a slow pace and incredible patience.

I don’t think that’s understood. Our generation is lacking connection but we want to make fast friends through apps or other means. Connection – real, deep and honest connection – takes persistence. It takes courage, it takes time, it takes patience. One cannot expect to be close friends after meeting someone once, I don’t care how much you have in common. The pace can be quicker if you share interests but it still takes a natural amount of time to feel a tight bond, one that is built through shared experiences and mutual trust and understanding. These things take time. Love takes time.