Isn’t that just the thing?
The grind, I mean, not what that just made you think of. Everything worthwhile and lasting takes time and energy, and time and energy is work. Literally. Okay, in physics, work equals force x displacement, which means you do work moving yourself up a flight of stairs or carrying a box from here to there. That’s physical work, and it’s relatively easy to calculate (very easy when considering a frictionless plane in a vacuum, which is where all introductory physics problems live and which doesn’t remotely exist in nature). Emotional and intellectual work is different. Again, time and energy. And on this tangled plane full of friction and other types of resistance, work is not just time x energy, but time x energy + patience.
Isn’t that just the thing?
I am not a patient person, as many customer service representatives I’ve dealt with know from direct experience. In fact, I find patient people downright confounding. I hate waiting, and I hate working through the last, horrible 10% of a problem to make things as right as I possibly can. That said, my entire life revolves around activities that require excruciating amounts of patience, most notably software engineering and writing. By god, I will learn this patience thing by the time I die, or I’ll be doomed to repeat another lifetime on earth to get it to sink into my thick skull.
But isn’t that just the thing? The idea that we’re here to learn a lesson and that we’re doomed to repeat a grade over and over again until we do? Why not submit ourselves to this thing that the universe clearly wants of us: to grow, to mature, to master the things that irk us the most? So I’ve resigned myself to facing situations that require patience, I’ve given myself over to the idea that this is the next huge thing for me to address, and I’ve even covered a not insignificant amount of my body in tattoos to remind me of this commitment just in case I forget in a momentary fury at being put on hold again.