Patience is something I have to work on every single day. Patience that my time will eventually come. And maybe while I try to learn patience I’ll also realize that now is my time. I think it’s unhealthy to always be looking towards the future. At some point we need stop and enjoy and appreciate where we are currently at in life. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t always strive for more and work harder but that there is always an opportunity for contentment in any given situation.
I want to be a writer one day and although my blogs have totaled up over 50,000 views over the last few years I wouldn’t consider myself a writer. I have a habit to determine what I am by what I do. In my day job I schedule routine maintenance on machinery, but that’s only what I do, it’s not who I am. Who I am is more important than what I do, and still even more important than that is who God says I am.
I want to be self employed and I want to build spec homes and I want to own cattle and have horses and everyday I wrestle with just plugging away at my job or dropping everything and starting my own venture, whatever that may be. Here’s the thing, I’ve done that before and I learned a lot of painful lessons along the way. One of the most important lessons was to have patience.
Patience is such a simple concept, it’s literally just waiting. But actually having patience is a much harder thing to actually do. I don’t have a fancy three step process for becoming patient but I have had some thoughts about it.
Patience can be learned.
Patience is a skill and any skill can be learned. I’ve started with small things like waiting several months to buy a certain book I want or purposely setting my cruise control to the exact speed limit. It’s funny because when I do that I still end up where I was heading. And isn’t that ironic? Having patience doesn’t mean you won’t get to where you want to, it just means it will take longer than you thought. In a situation like that you can force things to move faster which usually cause disaster of some sort, or you can go with the flow.
Your current situation is probably not as bad as you think it is.
I love my job. I really do. It’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. It’s very rewarding and allows me a lot of freedoms. I get to do 70% of my job at a desk where I can listen to audio books and podcasts all day long. I choose what I want to work on each day and I choose when I want to show up to work and when I want to leave. I don’t clock in or clock out and I see my boss once a day, sometimes less. In spite of all that I still want to be self employed. I know one day that time will come but in the meantime there are worse situations I could be in. Look for the green grass on your own side of the fence before trying to jump to the other side, you’ll probably find some. If you don’t find any green grass, it may just mean that you need to water it a little bit.
The longer something takes, the more time you have to plan.
Realistically (and for the sake of my wife’s heart rate) I probably won’t be 100% self employed for at least five years. Right now we’re growing our family and still building a foundation. We want to pay off all of our debt in the next couple years then buy a long term home to raise our kids in. The best part of the process taking five years? I have so much time to think and plan and process. Now there is such a thing of overthinking, and spending so much time planning that you end up doing nothing but there is also something to be said for setting a deadline or a goal, years in the future and then working towards that.
I’m the only one that rushes myself around in life and so that means I can set a new tone and choose patience. Part of that has been deleting social media so that I don’t compare myself to others who are farther along in life that I feel like I ought to be. I’m right where I am for a specific time and reason and so are you.
