Patience in Practice

Sunday Musings on Father’s Day.

I am also celebrating life, 10 years after Thomas & my near fatal car accident.

I wrote a blog that summer about patience and baggage - and here we are again - 10 years later, moving through a global pandemic. As artists, patience has become a never ending focus.

Patience doesn’t mean you simply wait. Patience is active. Patience is decisive. Patience is focus. Patience is practice. Patience means you are ready, or getting ready, for what comes next. Patience has movement; allows for movement.

Baggage, on the other hand….it’s heavy. It creates such weight, such self-doubt, such hesitation, such fatigue.

We are survivors. Truly now more than ever. We may not feel that survival for awhile, but it’s there in our cell memory. Recognizing the weight of survival baggage gives a place to set it down.

Now more than ever, we can give ourselves permission to cultivate patience. We can enter a space - literally and figuratively - on our own terms. Paradigms are being shattered, questioned, cracked, and lights are being turned on. This means, we must not return to the way things were; we must built on the things that need to be.

The baggage we carry does not need to come with us.

The patience we cultivate to discover, hone, and develop will allow us to lead with the mindset, the sense of self, the craft and the authenticity & integrity we wish to lead with.

Artistry takes life experience. Experience has to be lived. Do not let anyone tell you that you MUST be ready on their timeline. You are ready on YOUR timeline. Not your wishlist timeline, but in your actual patience cultivated time. No excuses, no exhaustion, no weight.

You are ready when you are ready. Your time is your time. Your journey and its momentum is yours, and yours alone. It is not dictated by agenda, wishing, wanting, pushing, rushing, hoping, or trying to fit into a preconceived box provided to you.

Now that our industries are picking up steam, some of us have the tendency to say “I’m late!” and the rush begins. Stop. Take a breath and release it. Where are you? Why are you? What do you want to do? What stories do you want to tell? Who do you want to create with? Where do you want to create? What needs to happen to cultivate the patience to discover that?

You are not late. I will say it again: YOU ARE NOT LATE. You are precisely on time.

Cultivate your patience to absorb and discover this time. What do you need? How do you work toward and into that?

Patient focus. Right now. Otherwise, the weight of the baggage you carry distracts you; the rushing and panic prevents you from seeing something right in front of you.

You will find a place. You will create a place.

You will continue to become the artist you are revealing.

Simply begin.

with fondness & fierceness,