I am becoming more and more patient with my impatience,
and more and more tolerant of my intolerance,
more and more forgiving of my unforgiving ways….
not sure what that means.
is this self compassion finally breaking through?
Am I finally gaining wisdom?
Or is it I am just too tired to care anymore.
Maybe its me, maybe I am getting older, but when you have lots of time, being patient comes easy. But getting older means you know your time is limited and less and less are you willing to sit around to endure endless meetings or hollow events or pursue concerns that seem frivolous or irrelevant to the main concern. We realize at some point that we have to make the main thing the main thing.
What does that board meeting matter in the final wrap up of eternity. Will the eternal auditor in the sky be asking you- what was that $113.46 cents spent on in September? Do you have a receipt and was it in the budget? Why didn’t you use the generic brand?
At some later point, we come to understand that its not lack of money or lack of friends or lack of opportunity that casts the greatest shadow over our lives, its the lack of time- the one thing we know infallibly that we will run out of, and the one thing we seem to so be so profligate in wasting- on so many concerns that don’t matter and perhaps will never matter.
Then somehow a fiercer force arises from deep within us, not out of impatience or boredom but out of the singular defense of time, my time, your time, everyone’s time. No one has a right to waste anyone else’s time. To show up late, to come unprepared, to indulge in distracting side conversations, perhaps at one point in our lives are unavoidable irritations but at some point, they becomes crimes against humanity, because what they take away can never be won back.
When you die, OK, we have eternity, God’s time and he took 14 billions years to make life on earth. He can relax, but us poor humans, all we get if we are lucky is 50 or 70 or 90 years. No time to shake a galaxy loose or have a big bang- No, yet enough time to know what time is for and to live so that we are not merely marking time, but making sure it counts.