Patience

My greatest weakness is that I am impatient. This impatience applies to so many areas of my life from cooking to relationships to just dealing with the everyday parts of life. When I have no control at all: being stuck in traffic on the freeway, waiting in a doctor's office, waiting in a long line, or sitting on a delayed plane flight, I force myself into an almost meditative positive state to get through it. Ironically, in some of the most awful times, when there is nothing I can do, I am quite patient and make the best of it. I make lemonade out of lemons. I often keep a notebook in my purse or have a book nearby and I'll take that waiting as an opportunity to read or write. When we ran out of gas one time I took some of my favorite pictures waiting for the auto club to come and help us. Same with the dead battery. My daughter and I had a nice time waiting together. Sometimes I am just still and try to notice what is around me.

However if there is the slight modicum that I might have control over "the waiting," that I personally can do something "to hurry things along" then having patience is my greatest challenge. In cooking I can't tell you how many times I didn't let the onions caramelize enough before I added the tomatoes. I was impatient to get the recipe finished and put in all the ingredients. But if I could have just waited a few more minutes than the onions would have been sweet and perfect. The acid in the tomatoes stops the onions from caramelizing so no matter how long you cook your sauce or soup you after you prematurely add the tomatoes you can't go back and fix the onions. My impatience as a cook prevented the onions from developing that sweet and delicious depth of taste. Instead they are bitter and I kick myself every time I eat the Vodka Sauce that I literally didn't take five extra minutes to wait. The same with veal stock that needs to be reduced. TIME IS THE KEY FACTOR. Let it alone and let it slowly do what it is supposed to do. The difference is either watery tasteless broth or a deep rich incredible sauce. And patience is what it takes.

I'm a doer. I like to get things done. I like to make decisions and go forward with a plan. I don't like to sit around and wait to decide what to do. I'm also used to being in charge. I was used to running large events and giving directions and getting a lot done. I accomplished so much at such a frenetic pace that it made some people's heads spin. I however felt like I wasn't accomplishing enough. I'd have 20 things on my list of things to do and would find I was lucky if I could truly accomplish three to five of those each day. There was always something "more" I could do and I impatiently wanted to do it all. And the result is that you have a feeling of "never enough." That there is never "enough time" and that you just make endless lists of "more to do."

Perhaps the greatest lesson I received of all is working with my special needs daughter homeschooling. When I'm working with her I must wait. I can't make grocery lists or clean the house to work on another project when I'm next to her. I have to just sit there and BE with her. 95% of the time she gets the right answers but I must give her the time to figure out those answers on her own. I want to give her the answers or show her a quicker way. But I have to let her do it alone. Her art is the same. She draws very slowly and meticulously but the most beautiful drawings emerge if you give her the time and space to do her art. Suddenly while I'm waiting "time" seems longer. The clock isn't spinning as quickly. Everything had to slow down so much that I was even aware of my breathing. I had to learn to be "in the moment" with her.

I know many of you who have read my recipe testing emails have noticed my typos or mistakes that were all a result of speed. I want to write as quickly as I can and hit send. Proof-reading requires patience and time and I just want to write and share. We live in such a time of instant gratification. We have fast food, we have text messages and emails. Everything is so immediate that we are so used to getting things in an instant and when we don't it is so easy to get frustrated. Interruptions and delays are all things that seem intolerable.

But I have learned how priceless patience can be. A dear friend wisely wrote to me "when you don't know what to do next: do nothing. When you don't know: be still in the moment. The 'thing to do' will present itself." Another friend told me her favorite quote is "Be still and know that I am God." That you can only hear and feel God when you are still and patient enough to listen, not rushing around in oblivion. Think of seeing and feeling the depth and beauty of nature. If we are always rushing to our next appointment or worrying about making the next phone call than we may not notice the tree in bloom next to the freeway or have the moment to take a walk and see what is all around us. Even my recent internet connection challenges, which were so frustrating at first, have been their own gift of learning the beauty and gift of patience and waiting. Think of a child's joy when the power goes so they can light candles and pretend they are camping vs the adult's frustration with the challenges of it.

Recently I've been given two incredible examples about Patience. One is from Zorba the Greek and the other is from David Anderson's book Breakfast Epiphanies entitled Hands Off: We Hatch Alone.

"I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in a bark of a tree, just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited awhile, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life.

The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it I tried to help it with my breath. In vain.

It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of its wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.

The little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience, for I realized today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm." --Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

The second from David Anderson, called Hands Off: We Hatch Alone also requires the miracle of patience. It is the greatest gift you can give those you love whether they be child, spouse or friend.

"Last week a box of chicks were hatching in the kindergarten classroom of our day school. There was a long line of children outside the class waiting to get a peek at the eggs. So I got in line. It had been a while for me, too.

As they moved through the line, all the children had their hands clasped behind their backs. I inquired why. Teacher's orders: This is how we approach mysteries that we cannot touch. Good idea. I put my hands behind my back, too. The eggs were small and quiet in the light. One was slightly cracked, another chipped, a small shell fragment lying below. But most were perfect and still.

We watched those eggs for the next week. When one hatched, the chick was moved into a box with the other free birds. But I kept noticing the quiet eggs, the few that couldn't seem to break free. In the kitchen with a cup of coffee I asked Annette, one of the teachers, what was wrong.

'Actually,' she said, 'we're doing pretty good. Odds are, 25 percent just don't hatch. And of course,' she said, 'you can't help them do it." Remember that childhood lesson?

It's worth remembering. We talk much about our interdependence, about helping one another, and it's true--to a point. But we cannot help a single other person hatch. If the task of life is to break continually out of the shells that confine us and into freedom, that is a solitary task. Helping doesn't help.

Every child must resist officious adults. 'I want to do it myself!' The tendency of love is to do too much. We can't keep our hands off other people's struggling lives. We forget that the struggle is natural and necessary. It's painful and perilous to get into this world, and it's usually more of the same when we leave. No strife, no life. But every generation wants to spare its children the bitter struggles of its own enduring. What we now call 'the greatest generatioin' often wonders how their children and grandchildren would have been be able to endure war, Depression, rationing, universal sacrifice and hardship. The answer is simply that the 'greatest' generation determined to eliminate for its children the very difficulties that made them great. They ran resistance for their kids, they gave them money for nothing and perks for free. They got them better jobs to start and acceded to the notion that they ought to have at the beginning of their lives everything their parents had at the end. And they did it absolutely in love.

Reinhold Niebuhr said, 'I am never so dangerous as when I act in love.' Not only romantic love is blind. Every so-called love that seeks to do for others what needs--crucially--to be done by oneself is blind to its own ego needs. When I seek to help others, what need is that meeting in me? Do I need to appear stronger? If my child fails, am I afraid of how that reflects on me, on my family? If we're not asking these questions, we're dangerous in love.

In twelve-step terminology, that kind of 'love' is called enabling. It's helping someone to death. Some of us have friends or family in that extreme plight. And all of us deal daily with ordinary people who need to hatch. Our job is to coach some and cheer for progress but mostly to leave them alone. Beautiful, life-giving neglect.

It was fun watching the chicks peck, wriggle, and kick their way into this life. But then I'm not a chicken. It's much harder when one of your own is on the dark side of that shell. Then it can hurt. Then it's life and death. Then we want to reach out and help...just a little. Our hearts actually get in the way; we forget that no one can break anyone else through.

Parents cannot do it for adolescents and adult children; husbands and wives cannot do it for one another; neither can friends. We cannot stop drinking for someone else; we cannot find someone a vocation; we cannot stop (or start) eating for another; we cannot life the pall of depression or assuage the unspeakable pain of a single other person. If they are going to break into freedom, they will have to hatch themselves. We can keep the egg warm, and we must pray--but with hands folded behind our backs. For this is the only way we may approach mysteries that we cannot touch."

Patience has so many aspects to it: Patience helps us to be who we are as individuals. Patience allows others to be themselves. Patience allows "flavors to develop" in a recipe, flowers to bloom, trees to grow tall, grape juice to change into wine, children to learn to walk, and gifts to be born. Patience, while it involves waiting, miraculously allows us to be here now. It allows us to see and enjoy the gift of this moment and to appreciate the process as much as the final result.