A Resilient Patience: When It’s All in Good Time

With degree and job contract in hand, I postponed the start date so I could spend time merely filling canvases with colour, and appreciating the freedom of having nowhere I had to be or anything I had to do.

Some of my peers travelled, but having moved every four months for the past five years in university, and years of trekking back and forth to either parent, and years before that of moving home to and fro across Canada, I couldn’t wait to see how roots felt.

If you’d asked me then, I would have said that I enjoyed painting. The truth was that I panicked in the face of every blank canvas. I didn’t doodle. I owned many notebooks with nothing but white empty pages in them; I still do.

One day, I sat at my keyboard and I started writing. Since I started writing, not once have I felt that pressure – or that anticipation – as I did when the white was a canvas.

I’d say I finally found my medium. It’s words, not acrylics.

As a writer – or as a typist, more specifically – I feel freedom and flow in a way that I’ve never felt under the “artist” label. Writing by hand, I can’t get the words out fast enough. My mind is two sentences ahead of a hand that is still ending that first sentence. Yet in high school, I barely passed typing, and I didn’t enjoy English class at all.

I bid you, if there’s pressure to write, maybe you haven’t found your perfect medium, but you are doing the right thing – being creative, looking within, and trying to pull something out that is singular to you and yet universal to humanity.

Serving your purpose is not something to fear. It never was.

Expressing Your Truth

Your fear is losing something in translation. That translation from the truth within to the one you share may be difficult because you haven’t yet found the medium that loses the least in translation.

For instance, they say that cultures in the far north have many different words for what people around the equator simply call “snow.” There are no words for what needs to be said, yet on the palette of a visual painter, all can be expressed.

There’s more than words or visuals to consider. A perfumer conveys a time, place, feeling and more with a fragrance. A musician takes you to a memory with a few notes. For every sense, and their combinations, there is a truth being expressed, in the way that loses the least in translation.

From the creator to you, then through you. Don’t let courage hold you back, but let fear redirect you to where your best expression and highest truth await.

Just saying, sometimes fear whispers truths, and sometimes it hijacks reality. When it’s a complicated relationship, neither side benefits from the one who thinks domination is the answer.

Willpower is not everything. Sometimes, it’s the least kind thing.

Maybe my artwork was better than my ramblings, and maybe one day, you’ll get the chance to judge for yourself. Maybe like me, you’ll find your authentic journey while out on the one you thought you wanted.

Fear? What fear? That flip-flop butterfly feeling in my gut is excitement, baby. I can’t wait.

Hearing the Truth

Recently, I was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital when a gentleman asked if he could sit beside me. I welcomed him, and he said, “You’d never guess my age. I’m going to be eighty in December.”

He said it with pride and confidence that starkly contrasted with the patients surrounding us.

As it turned out, his close relations were only a few months apart, yet both were in and out of the hospital and not likely to make their respective eightieth birthdays.

“Clean living. No smoking, no alcohol, a good diet, and exercise. That’s it,” he said, sharing that he’d gone roller-skating with his step-son the previous day.

The health care journey took us to different waiting rooms at different times, yet as he passed by my way on his way out, he took the opportunity to reiterate what he’d said: “Kombucha, green tea, milk sometimes, water of course, but hardly any alcohol.” I smiled and nodded, and he waved goodbye.

What if none of your mistakes were your fault, but the choice of continuing to make them now makes them your fault. Your first mistake is free, the second a beacon that you didn’t get the lesson the first time, and when it’s three strikes, you are out of chances.

No sympathy for the devil.

Or the arrogant, or the narcissistic, or the martyr who can’t say no and is therefore too overwhelmed and overscheduled to notice that everyone else has noticed what she was hoping to hide.

For all the patterns you notice in others, have you noticed them in yourself yet?

Heralding a New Truth

I didn’t know if he thought he was offering advice or if he had spied a fellow driver in the crowd. If it was the former, perhaps this is why you don’t wear the wardrobe of a teenager – people will think you are a teenager making poor life choices, rather than an old woman rocking a relic of a garment.

I hope it was the latter, though I have been working on improving my self-care. I have a hard time with vegetables unless I grow them, and only like them raw, which is making the oncoming winter question my habits.

First, you notice the pattern. Don’t make God tell you twice. It’s not a threat, but to point out that you are using up more precious attention than required, and that attention might be coming from somewhere else where it’s more needed.

Breaking free of it is a matter of doing what scares you, the opposite of what comes easily and naturally. Before the new behaviour is the stopping, the ending, the letting go.

The big fat pause.

The deep breath.

Tuning into your gut because it’s demanding your attention with it’s dramatics.

Remembering, taking a different way this time.

Relabelling, this is the feeling of adventure.

Reframing, this is beginner’s mind, I have every right to make mistakes. They might even be funny – even for me.

These days, with no external pressures or stress, I’m at my university weight—a time when I felt similarly free yet so naïve and unready for that freedom.

It seemed I gained a pound for every deep regret, every conscious effort to improve, and every mistake made under the glaring spotlight. Thirty pounds are gone in retirement, and I’m back to wearing clothes I did twenty years ago.

These garments show their age, if they are in perfect condition. I’m glad I saved them.

When I retired, I donated 17 garbage bags full of clothes, but I held on to these garments that didn’t fit me. They are cotton jeans and shirts without spandex to soften them. I wore these brands as a snowboarder, which was how I spent my winters at that age, and they are marketed to young teens.

These garments are in good condition because the weight started piling on when I returned to the workforce after that short hiatus. I kept down the words I knew I couldn’t say by stuffing food down my throat, and I kept the anxiety that kept me awake at night at bay by drowning it in alcohol. It was some sad times for the sake of an income.

Today, as I wear them and drive a car that’s also twenty years old, yet with a pristine interior, I feel the same as when I was twenty years younger. The study showed that your external environment signals your mental age, and your body follows.

Too bad that I never thought to ask, “How old do you think I am?”

I’m not chasing youth, and I’m not afraid of age, but I’m learning to cherish health and that means putting myself first. It’s a lesson I’m still learning, even as I continue to learn the power of service and surrender – to simply do what the universe asks of you when it’s clear that it’s your move.

Quick and Nimble, On the Alert

You have to stop, be quiet and pay attention. When someone across the waiting room spills coins across the floor, you are the one to notice, and also to see that neither he nor the person with him is capable of bending over, much less scooting around to collect them. So you do it and quietly place the coins on the counter before him without interrupting the exchange with the nurse behind the desk.

It’s quiet, it’s small, and it’s necessary, but when everyone else is heads down with their phones or with paperwork, your ability to be present is your job. What unfolds will amaze you if and when you pay attention.

Like how often you get in your own way.

You may have a sizeable budget to create the working space of your dreams, or you might have to settle for the best you can afford. Either way, factors related to your chosen space can help or hinder you.

The most fundamental foundation for your life is organization. This means that there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. You can find what you need to when you need it, you know what you have, and when it is about to run out.

Never scramble, never misplace, never burst at the seams. It’s an ideal you might consider working toward, as many companies employ experts to do for them.

On the manufacturing line, mere seconds are costly. If an operator has to scramble to find the right part, put it on properly, or encounter any issue that slows him down, the time starts adding up quickly.

Workers may feel pressure to push through defects, but Toyota empowers employees to stop the line so they can address the issue immediately, at its heart.

Seconds that Matter, On the Clock

In spending seconds, they can ensure consistently high quality from one vehicle to the next. The organization assists in creating collaboration, speed, and repetition.

Remember, all this attention to an organized and well-functioning environment matters because consistent replication comes first, and shaving even a few seconds directly impacts the bottom line. Time isn’t always your priority as a knowledge worker, and consistent replication isn’t always your objective.

To sit or to stand, is that the question? Or is a treadmill desk the way to go? Having a functioning work environment means different things to different people, as it should. The point is to change it periodically so that you aren’t doing the same thing for a substantial period. You are built to move, so move that body.

People are built differently physically, and their tools should reflect these differences. Ergonomists ensure that work doesn’t hurt, as it never should. They are key resources when designing and setting up any work environment.

When your work environment suits your needs, you are better equipped to work at your most productive level. If anything in your work environment is not working for you, recognize that changing it may not be as complicated or expensive as you think, and it may pay off more than you ever anticipated.

Doing less will age your body, and you will feel worn out long before your time. Don’t let that happen. Be in the long game.

Systems that Click, On the Dime

A loop of activity is a process, and a bunch of processes that interconnect is called a system. It’s when they interconnect that you will experience failures you didn’t expect, but also opportunities you didn’t anticipate.

One trick for remembering to go to the gym in the morning is to leave your bag at the door. However, if you take your bag to the laundry room because there are dirty clothes that need washing, you might forget it there. The next morning, not only are you late to the gym because you rushed around to collect clean clothes, but you also forgot a critical item, and now you are rethinking your entire process.

It’s not the process that’s broken; it’s the system. Laundry existed in your life before and after your goals to go to the gym. You need to figure out how to connect the two for sustainable progress.

When you purchase enough garb to make it to laundry day, that’s the sense behind what’s common – connecting systems.

A system takes into account the entire end-to-end process and all its intersecting ones, so it’s not just about having your bag at the door. An effective system has produced a bag at the door ready to go whenever you need it.

All you need is a little creativity. After all, necessity is the mother of invention, and now you have a system for identifying your priorities and necessities.

Visually, the system begins with three things: a glass jar, stones, and sand. The sand represents all the little things, the stones represent the important things, and the jar represents the reality of our finite time and energy.

If you put the sand in first, you can’t get the stones in. They stick up out of the jar and plug the neck. However, when you reverse the order, everything fits. The stones go first, and the sand takes up the space around them. It’s tight and snug, supported and constant.

If you wondered why change was so difficult, now you see that you had to dump your jar to put your new stones in – the values you always knew you had, lost in the dust of the ones you were taught.