Was it Worry, or Was It Patience?

In response to Dancing Elephants prompt 50 of 52

The most valuable thing I learned in my life has to do with worry. I have had a lifelong thing with worrying. It was worse when I was younger. Why it happened, I don’t know. Perhaps, somewhere, something happened. Perhaps that one thing resulted in me being worried about most things.

Sometimes, I was paralyzed and actually got frozen on the sidewalk. Mostly, it would happen when I was a little girl, but it has happened a few times as an adult. The last time was me walking to a part-time job I got after I retired. But the last time it happened, I didn’t panic, which was a first. I waited. And, with patience, after a minute had passed, I was able to lift my foot and take another step.

Perhaps that one incident indicated that maybe I had finally learned patience. I knew if I waited just a little bit, I would be able to continue walking to work. It’s funny because I never did tell anyone about it. I just checked in with my mother, who died ten years ago, and she told me she had not been aware of it, so I guess I never told her.

That’s the thing about channeling. I can talk to dead people. This is also something I am very thankful for, and having patience was invaluable in the process of opening to channeling. You don’t learn a thing like that. It is more that you discover you can do it. I knew when it took me years for the process of connecting to Spirit to happen was that everybody could do it. It was also after it happened that I realized I’d been doing it all along without knowing what it was.

I could have done it years earlier, but I had to learn a few things prior to being able to channel.

One of them was to have patience in the face of failure.

If I were to compare channeling to something we all know about, I would choose learning to walk. We don’t start out walking, and yet, within a short time of our lives, we eventually learn to walk. There are stages, though: rolling around on the floor, reaching for our toys or pets, wanting to go to our toys or pets, learning if we can hitch ourselves along, we can crawl, climbing up our parent’s legs or the furniture to stand wobbling to finally taking that first step. All that involved patience, and we have all done it.

I had to let go of so much of what I believed in to be able to talk to Spirit finally.

So, I believe the most valuable thing I’ve learned is patience with myself. I know I said it was worry at the beginning of this piece, but now I’ve decided it is patience.

I still worry. But, with patience, that can be handled.

I think patience can be encouraged if you are first patient with yourself. If you don’t know what patience feels like, how could you ever be truly patient with somebody else? Actually, I don’t know that I have truly and completely learned patience. I think it is something that you learn over and over again.

Like the difference between being frozen on the sidewalk in mid-stride, where worry actually makes the situation worse, to being patient with myself, knowing that the frozen episode will gradually ease.

The other way patience has revealed itself to me is in learning new things. Sometimes, learning is easy for me, and other times, it is very difficult. The desire to learn must be there first for something to be learned, and patience has got to be there for any sign of success. For me, anyway. Plus, learning happens in stages anyway.

A three-year-old cannot possibly wrap their mind around an algebraic equation. So, you wait until the student is more like fourteen or fifteen years old to learn those things. But the process of learning things like algebra builds on the knowledge of numbers, and that’s what starts at three years old.

I am grateful to the folks at Dancing Elephant Press for suggesting this writing prompt. It is the beginning of my day, and it’s always good to start your day by being grateful.

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