Patience is a Virtue
As January comes to an end, so does the first month of the “New Year/New You” mantra. For me, it’s interesting to see the New Year resolutions that are seemingly the easiest on paper, turn out to be the hardest. It’s a known fact that physical exercise and eating healthy are big adjustments and take quite the commitment in order for you to see any results; however, no one really talks about healing or working on your mental health and what to expect. Across social media, you see people talk about how they started meditating daily, doing yoga, breathing exercises, physical activity, writing positive sayings on their mirror - and voila! It worked for them and magically fixed. Then you go to do it and think - what the hell am I doing wrong?? This shit is hard! No amount of post-its are keeping my thoughts constantly positive throughout the day. Yeah, maybe these things work for people, but what’s failed to be mentioned is what actually turns these rituals into routine.
It takes a whole lotta patience for you to actually heal and grow. It’s so much more than just going through the motions. It’s understanding and catching yourself in those motions in order to change your behavior or your reaction. When I was younger, I remember we took a trip to Hawaii to visit my grandparents and went kayaking one day. There in the rocks were a bunch of coconuts that had been washed up to shore. My grandmother told me that the Hawaiian women would sit and peel back the hairs one by one in order to crack open the shell and get to the “monkey face” of the coconut and that this was the true test of one’s patience. Now I have no idea if that was true or not (never went to fact check it haha), but I sure as hell sat there peeling each hair one by one in order to open up the coconut and get to the fruit. It took me probably an hour because the coconuts had been submerged in water, but I was determined to get it open - and I did! The fruit was all mush and rotten, but that’s besides the point haha! The point is, I was a very patient kid and somewhere along the way, I learned this sense of urgency. A sense of needing results now or it must be a reflection of myself that I can’t get them immediately. I’m sure there are 101 societal things that played into that, but all I know now is - I need to get back to that patience and grace I had for myself as a kid.
So here I am, only at the end of the first month this year thinking - what the hell am I doing wrong? Why aren’t all my practices magically healing my mind? It’s as if I’m taking 5 steps forward only to be pushed 10 steps back. And what I’ve realized is, it’s not like physical health where you see results in the mirror (after one month) that motivates you to keep going. These results are more discrete. The work is constantly happening with each situation or conversation and you don’t really notice the change until you’re no long trying as hard as you once did and slowly but surely, it stops being something you work at and it becomes who you now are. You have to patient with yourself - to have the ability to sit there and peel a coconut for an hour, one hair at a time.
Therefore this post is to remind us all that yes, small practices of yoga, breathing. positive thoughts, etc. can help hoist ourselves up to the next level towards mental health, but patience is the true key to lifelong change. Be patient and kind to yourself and others. We are all slowly getting our feet back under ourselves - whether it be more recently due to the pandemic or many years of work you’ve been pouring into yourself. We are all human and I believe once we can see/offer that grace in others, it’s a step towards being able to offer it to ourselves.
