Water In The Air: Practicing Patience

There I was at the light, fully stopped, when it happened. By a millisecond, I heard it first. Then in less than a breath felt the fullness of the impact. It was a rainy day in Delray, heavy rains that made the roads slick. I will die on the hill of Florida having some of the worst drivers in all of the fifty states. It doesn’t take much water in the air for me to see three or four accidents in the middle of perfectly unassuming roads, and on that day I was one of them. 

She was young, probably on her phone, and absolutely distraught. I was driving Uber and, thankfully, my passenger got out and was very nice about it all while on the scene. This is the only product placement you’ll ever hear me do: thank God, I drive a Subaru. Her car was wrecked, crunched in and steaming. My car took the impact on the right rear bumper and (I later learned) the muffler, but remained drivable. The Tesla driver in front of me stayed behind and gave me their dashcam footage of the accident. The police took their sweet time, but eventually a traffic incident officer arrived and took the report. Uber, by means of algorithmic deduction, was alerted to the probability of an accident and the assigned insurance adjuster called me before I even got back in my car to go home. 

The whole thing was definitely not on my bingo card for the day. 

But I walked away. Went to the hospital later because of a persistent headache, but imaging showed I was otherwise fine. What could have been was not and, as I was brought home from the hospital, I saw far worse. In the end there is much to be grateful for. Much, except for the fact that my car is now shut down by Uber. Within a millisecond, I lost my access to income. 

That’s how quickly your entire world can change. 

I feel like most things in life can be categorized one of four ways: complex but easy, complex and difficult, simple and easy, or, simple but difficult. The first of the verbs states the nature of the task and the second your relationship to it. For example, for a six-year-old, tying your shoes is both complex and difficult, but for an adult it is simple and easy. Running a bunch of errands may prove simple but difficult, depending on how much energy you have that day, but something like completing an algebraic equation may be complex but fairly easy, depending on your inclination towards math. 

Patience is simple, but boy is it difficult. 

I received the revelation in parts and in whole. The accident set off a series of events that have shown me what being patient really means. 

Patience is waiting with acceptance. 

The waiting part happens whether we want it too or not. There is nothing that I can do to make the repairs to my car go any faster. In this way, I have no control and am forced to wait. But accepting that I do not have my car, and therefore cannot Uber and make money, is a whole other story. The itch to call the shop everyday and ask for an update, to call the insurance company and push for the money to be sent faster, is almost diabolical. Will making these calls get my car fixed faster: nope. Do I know that intellectually: yes. So why the urge?

In my observation, humans seem to naturally misinterpret their relationship with control. It's like we have a total misunderstanding of where we have power over outcomes. More often than not, we believe that our actions can determine the outcomes of people, places, and things external to ourselves, all the while forgetting the thoughts, words, and deeds that are our own to command. We gripe about the attitude of the barista who takes our order, give them our "you know better than that" fake smile, because we think that they should behave towards us in a certain way. We kvetch to our friends about how things are done backwards in our workplace, look for little ways to subvert systems that don't make sense to us, because our office manager is a schmuck. We call the mechanic twenty times because we believe that “the squeaky wheel will get the grease,” and move things along faster. In every instance our urge to assert our authority is placed outside ourselves, but the idea that we should do less griping, kvetching, calling, manipulating, or whatever our inclination is, goes under our radar. 

What does it mean to accept something, to acknowledge it as it is without even the smallest effort to control it? This is the difficult part of patience, and the only ingredient that makes it thus. Otherwise, you are just waiting while trying to exercise power,  futilely, outside yourself. What power do you need to exert inside yourself to accept that which is outside your power? What sour tasting truths must you swallow? Why is it so damn hard to swallow them? 

A week goes by, and while the other driver’s insurance company has accepted liability, my car still wasn't in the shop for repair because of paperwork. I had a job fair to get to, and I don’t know if I can drive my car, rattling all the way up to West Palm Beach. The job I’ve applied for is an English as a Second Language teacher; I don’t really have a passion for it, but a job is a job and at least I would be in the classroom. However, I can’t afford an Uber so I would have to risk a half-hour drive with my bumper half-hanging and half-bouncing off of my back tire. Decisions, decisions.

So I start the day by asking my higher power to guide my decision, whether to risk going to the job fair or not. Then I take my roommates on a cigarette run. One of them, the “man of the house” gets the bug to jerry rig my bumper while I’m busy cleaning the kitchen and making, what was probably my third, cup of coffee. I get in the car and it sounds less like the monster truck rallies my nephews are so fond of watching, so I decide that’s the cue I need to go to the job fair. I don’t know what to expect, so I dress as if its a one-on-one interview, pack my resume, and head out the door. Only fifteen minutes into my drive, the oil light comes on. Now, what should have been a half-hour drive turns into an hour of stopping to check my oil, finding an auto part store, filling my oil up and getting back on the road. When I arrived to the job fair, it turned out to be a pool of nervous candidates waiting to be interviewed separately, and I was the lucky last. 

I think that acceptance is so hard because it is humility in action. It is a conscious choice to acknowledge our current moment, a willingness to receive the truth that we can only be here and now, that the present is all we can do anything about. Our past, even our last breath or word, is never to be lived again; our future is unknown, and not at all a guarantee. In acceptance we embrace the present, with its gifts and its limitations. Even as I write this, I accept that I cannot write and do any of the other myriad of things that want or need doing. I feel the breeze, but I cannot tell it where or how to blow. I hear the lawn mowers in the gated community just beyond the fence, and what can I do to keep them from disturbing my peace? Cars rush by on the road in front of the house, with bodies and faces I will never know, even if I were to see them later. All I have, in this present moment, is a good book, my laptop, some water and my vape. I have control over my thoughts, my words, and some of the actions of my body, and little else (thank goodness I'm not responsible for making my lungs take in air, because I'd probably forget). How does this reality relieve the ever-present burden I feel to be more? How does the burden I feel to be, and do, more fight against the reality of the present? Here I offer an experiment:

I invite you to rub your hands together. 

Are you doing it? If so, did you consciously think whether or not you should before you started? Can you remember, or did I, for one brief moment, have control over your actions? Have you stopped now? Did you stop because I extended you an invitation to stop, or because you felt foolish, perhaps even slightly offended or violated that you started in the first place. Perhaps, you saw my experiment coming and did nothing. Do you feel proud of yourself now, for resisting the urge to do as I asked? How has that resistance served you? Do you feel a minute amount more powerful than you did a moment before? Can you be sure? 

The experiment is over now. Perhaps you rubbed your hands together and perhaps you did not. In that moment, brief as it was, you had a choice to make. You had the reigns, complete control over the outcome. I made a suggestion, and maybe you followed it. Maybe, you didn't. But the point is that you had the power to determine the outcome. All the while, the world turned, and not around you, and a million things outside of your control happened, continued to happen. Seeing this truth is both the test and the answer key. All you have is yourself, in any present moment. You are where your power lies and you determine where you put it. But if you put it in a place that lives only in your mind - the future, past, other peoples thoughts, words, deeds, places you aren't and cannot be - you lose it without any gain other than worry or complaints. But if you focus your power on where your hands, your mouth, your heart are, then you are expending it for an increase, tenfold.

I think the possibility of the present lies in being present to yourself. I think the power of acceptance is the way it hones you in on what actually is - happening, living, existing, falling apart, resurrecting - right in front of your eyes. It is only in the present I have the power to do anything; the future is as out of my scope as the past, but in the present I am free and can decide what I will do with what little authority has been handed to me.

Even knowing this, I struggle. I struggle with acceptance. I struggle to accept that I cannot know the future, cannot change the past, can not alter others or even my own experience of the world beyond my own skin. Acceptance is radical and ridiculous but necessary for any true transformation of the most important actor in my life, myself. I cannot make the heavens give me what I want, but what will I do with what I have? So, I cannot drive for Uber to make money, but will I slow down enough to see that this enables me the time to write? I cannot know that I will walk into love, marry, have children, or die surrounded by family and friends, but I can make sure to reach out to my friends today, to love myself the way I want to be loved one day, to become the family member that I would want to hold close.

The better we get at ingesting the truth of how small and inconsequential we are, the sooner we can embrace the ways in which we hold infinite capacity. You cannot know yourself fully if you don’t know your place in the vastness of our world. You cannot know what you can do, without also knowing what you cannot. Should you wish to hold in your hands the currency of life, you must be willing to feel both sides of the coin. 

I was the last to be called in for an interview. They asked me to wait afterward; they were interested in putting me into a different role. I walked out with an intent-to-offer letter for the position of 8th grade English Language Arts teacher. I walked to my beat-up, not yet beat down, Subaru with a smile of wonder on my face. I almost didn’t come; now, I was being heralded as a godsend for a rising group of eighth graders who just need someone with the passion for education and love for children that I have. 

The whole thing was not on my bingo card for the day. 

And, just like that, I entered a different patience room. The job doesn’t start until July 27th. My car is still in the shop awaiting more money for more, originally unseen, repair. Today, I spent the last $41 I had to my name on about seven items at the Walmart grocery store. Even as I sit and write this from my patio, I do not know what the rest of the day holds for me. This is the reality of patience: it is a never ending exercise. There is always something we are waiting for, always something that we must accept. It is a perpetual invitation that life offers us, and as long as we are alive it will offer it again and again. 

Patience is virtuous but it is also necessary. It's absolute misery to fight tooth and nail against forces you cannot control. Its absolute torture to feel like you have no control over the things within your grasp. The work is learning to center your energy on what is within your control and to utterly relinquish all that is not. The closer relationship one has with this truth, the closer one’s relationship is to true joy.

There is a lot that I don’t know and don’t have control over, today. There is a lot that I can’t force or fix, manipulate or orchestrate, conquer or control. There are definitely unaddressed question marks littering the floor of my mind. There are things I’d love to know today that today will not reveal to me, barring a surprise. But with acceptance, the waiting for answers isn’t so bad. Acknowledging that there are questions and that I don't have answers, accepting the truth of that and allowing it to settle in my body, brings a stillness within reach that I often struggle to attain. Far from an attitude of defeat it brings me a sense of clarity, of what I can do something with and about. Today, without those answers, there is still so much that I can do. My actions become seasoned with intention, with a deeper sense of purpose. In this process, I become a little more free. 

I’m not deluded enough to think that this is easy. Acceptance is, perhaps, the hardest of the work that I have been given to do. I hold no trite belief that this revelation will set me on a path of total acceptance at all times. But for now, it removes the discontentment and opens the door to a moments peace. And what is life, but one moment following another, one day at a time.