Haiku — 0031: Patience.

The trick of not jumping the gun.

You see, It’s one of those days.

The ones when you are almost at the edge of your seat, ready to slug someone on the other side.

It doesn’t get more apt on such a day to think about patience.

Slow, yet powerful,

Elephant strolls the land,

Silent leviathan.

I was very much what you could call “an extremely impatient” child. Teen, even.

I had to respond to everyone and everything, retort, return, rejoinder, the whole lot. Emotions were always flying high, a child misguided into thinking he was correcting the wrongs meted out to him. You know, the idealist who would think he was being a “good friend” and, for example, keep ceding space.

But, in retrospect, all that amounted to was making my arguments and existence flimsy. A snowflake in a volcano, if you will.

It took me a long time to understand that silence BY ITSELF is not a sign of weakness, of being a pushover. Not acting is. The ability to restrain from ranting away, but measure my response, is one I am still trying to master. Perhaps that is where I could take inspiration from an elephant — One which is silent, a bit clumsy even, but when it counts, shakes the earth and raises hell. The child, for example, drew a line one day. A line so strong, that this number of friends went from double digits to a handful.

And those are his bedrock.

That is power.

That takes, as I am still learning, a lot of self-discipline and the constant growth of self.

Silently, a leviathan.

Yesterday’s Haiku —

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