I'm on my way

"Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you, but not the one ahead."


My first interview was scheduled today at 10:30...three and a half hours later...she is apparently still "on her way."

Living and working with people who exist "on Africa time," I knew these six months were going to teach me a lot about patience. Which I'm notorious for not having much of.

I've discovered there are a lot of different kinds of patience. One is learning to be flexible; findings ways to entertain yourself while wating for something that feels like it will never happen. (Like the amazing works of breath-taking artistic achievement I created while waiting for my interview...)

Or the kind of patience that accepts that everything won't all get done immediately. That sometimes taking the detours is the most important part.

But being in a field of work where it feels like every accomplishment is met with 10 different failures, I think the hardest patience to learn is the determination to be optimistic when met with every reason not to be.

This isn't stupid, always-sunshine-and-rainbows-optimism, but the patience to persevere when the odds are incomprehensibly against you. When thre seems to be no other way out but to give up.

I wanted to give up a lot last semester. And in many ways, I probably should have. My patience not to give up conflicted pretty terribly with my impatience to fix things immediatly.

To accept that nothing can be immediatly fixed (expect perhaps auto-correct spell check) takes a lot of patience. Sometimes too much.

I will never be a sunshine optimist, but a realist (somewhate dark and twisty) optimist. Which for me means that when faced with the shitty parts of life, sometimes there are no silver linings. Sometimes there isn't a golden piece of wisdom to be gained. Except to pick yourself up and keep going.

But this reality doesn't mean to give up. To acknowledge the hard things isn't to deny the fact that things can get better. That baby steps are sometimes the greatest accomplishment you will have. A tiny improvement in an otherwise overwhelmingly discouraging place can still sometimes be cause for celebration. To be patient; to know that although everything doesn't work out in the end, you have to hold on to the things that do.

...And on another note, I think I'm going to have to reschedule this meeting.