Patience

I have said before how very important trust is and my mind is not changed.  The next ingredient you need to take on life and this lifestyle is patience.  I am not really talking about the kind you have stuck in a grocery line or even in the emergency room hell.  Those while a pain in the ass really don’t require true patience, you can bitch and complain, tap your toe and mark the passage of time. 

I am talking about the kind of patience that is about coming to peace within you.  My step-son is a great example of a person who is going to have to spend years of his life learning patience.  He has the desire to do something, gets permission to do it and then believes that it must happen right then!  It can’t be delayed for a minute, an hour, or a day.   Well in reality it can and often it does but in his head he wants it now.  You can see him become visibly stressed out with that desire for instant gratification.  This isn’t something we ever set out to teach him but I am totally sure we are going to set out to teach him to have patience.

I freely admit that I wasn’t all that great with patience myself.  In fact, since I usually did everything for myself I didn’t need to be patient.  If I wanted it now I could just do it.  And I learned from a dysfunctional relationship with my ex to never even bother to ask my ex to do something for me emotionally.  It wasn’t going to happen and if it did, it was more than likely in some passive aggressive way that did damage.  Yeah, not healthy.

With my children and those I have raised, I didn’t have to be very patient.  I had ultimate mom power.  I could get what I wanted.  My kids know not to mess with me, LOL.  But on the flip side they also feel like I am one of the coolest people they know because I always treat them like people, not just “children”, even when I am ripping their heads off LOL.

There you go, in charge of the world but it wasn’t all that happy a world, it was just the one I had.  Then came Lee and really I think part of the reason the universe sent me Lee was to learn patience.  Since we met online, there was only the written word.  Patience isn’t really required there and if you have some skills with words there isn’t even likely to be much confusion involved. Really it is a good thing we met online because Master isn’t what you call the big conversationalist.  He is known for being quiet. Lee never fills the spaces in life with noise. Those first tests of patience came from his lack of verbal communication.  That was probably the easiest one LOL.  After that is seemed a life time of learning a whole different way of dealing with the world. 

I had to learn to pick my times to say something.  I couldn’t just dump it out there when I felt it.  I had to learn to think better before I spoke.  Couldn’t do that whole just whatever came to mind.  I had to learn to let things be and give Master time to think about what I said. 

I had to learn so much that more than once I really felt I would never get to the other side of it.  And every bit I had to learn was wrapped in patience.  I have a tendency to think a million miles an hour, react at a hundred miles an hour and only later put it all into place.  I won’t say that is good or bad but it was always the way it was for me.

With Lee that would never work, in fact, it would bring me exactly what I didn’t want; him pissed off.  I not only had to learn to use it with him and communicating but also where BDSM was concerned.  Like a child with a new toy, I went a bit nuts and if I couldn’t have it now I got pouty and hurt. You getting the picture here?  I wasn’t the most patient woman around then. 

My urge was to just set about to solving the problem that came up.  If something was planned casually, I wanted it set in stone.  I know now it was that need for feeling security that made me so hard line about this stuff.  And really I was showing some serious lack of trust when I couldn’t just let it “be”.

I spent so much time having these insane conversations in my head.  I was trying to drive that word and that concept of patience into my stubborn skull.  Oh and it was a fight, each and every day and for a time it almost came to be a mantra in the back of my mind each and every day.

I can’t tell you there was some easy way to get there.  I didn’t have a great moment where I got it and the light turned on.  There wasn’t…it was that hard fight each and every day to remind myself that I didn’t control the universe and the only way to get from here to there was to be patient.  Somehow it did get there and I found myself able to take a breath and wait.  I could tell Master when I was upset or scared and let him process that without expecting him to have an instant solutions.  I could make plans but not get lost in my expectations.  Really it made my life so much easier!

Learning patience, to live in the moment, to not get lost in my own thinking but be present…I think in many ways allowed me to be a better friend, a better mother and a better slave too. 

Not long ago Master and I were driving to a friend’s home.  On the way my rambling mind wondered if Master and I always had that easy melding of who we were and what we wanted or if it was something we learned to do with each other.  Like that old joke about couples who are together begin to look like each other over time.  I asked Master about it and he said he believed it was both.  That yes it was always an easy meld for us but also that we had both learned to fit together more and more. 

We had both learned patience.  And thank god Master could do it too cause there are times I would have killed me!  That analogy about people fitting together like puzzle pieces is true, you can fit together, solid and tight and comfortable.  But I think if you look with a microscope you will see that even the best pieces, have small gaps, little parts where it just doesn’t have a complete seal.  I think it is those gaps that get filled with patience and understanding.  These are the things you learn over time when you both learn each others language.  I think if you don’t learn to fill those gaps, that over time they will just grow, pushing the pieces apart and creating caverns that are way harder to fill, if they ever can be.

In the end, have patience with yourself, have patience with those you love.  Live in this moment instead of spending time wallowing in the past or worrying about what might come in the future. Let the flow of life happen and let the energy of the universe become the beat of your heart.  Find peace.