cultivate patience

Updated 9 months ago

think about growing a plant. you can try to tend to the soil, you can water it, you can check the roots. but no matter how much time, energy, or effort you invest, a plant grows (and dies) in its own time.

there are things that we can each control, but more often than not, change happens at its own scale, in its own pace. geological movements operate a different pace, scale, and timing compared to the growth a city, which is more different still from the pace of fashion, or modern technology. pace layering helps you remember that the world revolves in its own rhythms. the window of what we might call “now” is a relative measure, not an absolute one. you yourself have rhythms, if you allow yourself to feel them.

some things are slow, and that is good. fast things need slow things. doing needs being. exertion needs rest. things will happen in the time that they will happen.

rather than fatalism, patience is having a certain kind of faith.

exercises

• play music on shuffle without skipping a song.
• set a timer to work on something. stop when the timer stops, even if what you were working on wasn’t finished.

(there’s a dense, intertangled web between perfectionism, black-and-white thinking, fear of failure, self-worth, and constant self-judgment that i still haven’t yet fully processed—i feel like i’ve pulled apart pieces of it before, at various moments. but without consciously practicing writing as working memory, the complete picture still remains hazy, its contours poorly defined.)