Patience is found in holding together a mixed reality

​The best way to become an impatient person is by becoming a person who is waiting on a perfect world.

Life is always a mix of things that are going as planned, and things that are one hundred percent working against that plan.

Patience comes from our work to hold it all together.

I think about the pandemic. It is beginning to appear we are on the other side of it. We are on the other side of a year of people who have had to work in some challenging ways to hold it all together. Because if life has been nothing else the last fifteen months, it has been a mix!

I figure on this other side, we are a mix of people who grew patient during the pandemic or people who completely lost theirs.

I think I'm the former. I'm more patient.

I've spent a great deal of my life knowing there is no perfect reality. A big period of my life was spent numbing myself against that reality. But then there's been a new period in my life when I've gratefullly accepted it.

Going into the pandemic I knew it was just another part of the mix of holding it together.

There's a joy that comes in holding together a mixed reality that you will never find waiting on a perfect reality that never comes. Because the only way you can actually hold together a mixed reality is by being grateful for everything you're holding.

Everything.

Alexi Pappas says, "We are where we are thanks to everything that happened, and where we are is good."

Where we all are is not a perfect reality. But where we are is proof of our ability to hold our mix together. We've done it. Which means we can do it again today.

The key, I think, is growing more patient in the holding. The key is holding on with more gratitude than expectations. The key is to always be willing to rewrite the story - the page we are on - and not lose faith when it starts to look like we can't write the ending we'd hoped for.

Maybe we can't write the ending we'd hoped for.

But maybe, maybe in the willingness to hold it all together, we'll write an ending better than we'd ever imagined.

And we will be all the more patient because of it.