Impatience.

The sun is yet to break the cluttered suburban horizon, this campervan morning. There is a pervading feeling of an almost dew like dampness, autumnal morning freshness coupled with a wee chill. Steam rising from my morning coffee as I sit once more under the oak. As still as can be, not even a whisper of a breeze. Distant chattering crows, a disgruntled squirrel issues its screech like warnings from the branches of the oak and conversations from unseen robins. The morning is alive already. The sun finally breaks the rooftops warming the crowns of the ash and oak and a distant willow. The birds are busy after what seemed an age of absence. The usual mechanised hum of modernity leaks into everything, but that is the way of the world. Nature holding its own at the moment. One of my worse vices ( Amongst many ) that I have carried with me for some years is impatience, especially with some people, but also with objects ( I know… crazy isn’t it, it’s an object ), learning and sometimes life, to name but a few. My biggest learning over many years has been to sit with this hastiness. Auden remarks that impatience is perhaps the one cardinal sin and continues that :

“ Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return. “

The activist and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that :

“ Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century “.

I know where my learned behaviour of impatience came from and at the moment I am reminded of it daily. I am loving making my way slowly though Rick Rubin’s book ‘ The Creative Act ‘ a book of such thought provoking richness ( I have mentioned it before a few times ). I read books slowly, digest, make notes, lose myself, go back and have to reread. It has been a major antidote to my impatience. He writes that :

“ Our continual quest for efficiency discourages looking too deeply “.

I think that has been a huge learning for me. To stop the apparent allure and efficiency of impatience and practice looking a little more deeper. Lovely days people.

“ The pressure to deliver doesn’t grant us time to consider all possibilities. Yet it’s through deliberate action and repetition that we gain deeper insight “. Rick Rubin.