patience and impatience

Patience is accepting that things are the way they are.

Impatience is NOT accepting the way things are.

Being patient and therefore accepting does NOT mean that you necessarily like the way things are. It just means that you will not fight current conditions, or spend your time wishing that things were different.

If you spend your present moment wishing things were different and yet not doing anything to make things be different, than you are being impatient and you are wasting your time. If you really DO want things to be different, then make a plan and then make it happen.

It works with sewing too. People say, “I wouldn’t have the patience to make that” but what they really mean is that they would be sitting there the whole time, wishing that the thing they were making would be finished. Or maybe even that they were working on something else. I do that a lot - work on some project where I don’t like the fabric and wish I were working on something else. I should learn from this NOT to buy fabric just because it’s on sale, especially if I don’t like it intrinsically. But that’s a topic for my other blog.