The thing about affirmations that I've never gotten

It’s windy – every few minutes. Like a snorer – there’s quiet in between rattles. I’m in the cabin facing the freeway fence. The green tarp (heavy with continued yard clean-up) is trying desperately to fly out from underneath the twig pile. The flag is waving in one direction – south. The wind chime knocks against the exterior logs of the cabin. The maple tree’s new little shoots quiver and the thinner of the tall trees sway.

I have the Fahrenheat on but might not have needed it if I hadn’t left a window open a crack yesterday. It was beautiful in a whole different way then: warm as summer, green with fresh rain. I sat for an hour with the door open.

Today Donny visited. I tell him I need a break. “I need so much patience to get through my day,” I say. He tells me how much worse other people have it than us.

I pause. “I’m not saying things are so bad; only that I need a break.” He lies on the floor to ease his aching back until he gets his next phone call. Then he’s off.

For a while I wonder about what we said to each other, and the feel of two trains passing in the night washes over me. What does a person hear when you say the simplest of things? Did he hear an admission of impatience as, “Things are so bad?”

For a minute, (okay, a little longer) I make up the story that he’s using the word impatient against me. Impatience is not generally one of my “beating myself up” words. Hell, most of the time I wonder why the whole world isn’t bursting with impatience.

I’m talking about the kind of patience that has you walking through your day like you’re spending the whole of it sitting with a toddler learning to put on his shoes. Anne Lamott calls it “the emergency room” – treating people as if that’s where they are. You sit with those toddler-like or emergency room-like situations out of love and respect and because it’s the right thing to do (at least half the time). You’re okay with it, but gee, there are times you long to sit at your window with no needs to meet staring back at you, and let’s face it: we all need those moments.

I know I need a break as soon as I’m sitting like a kid in a classroom at the end of the day waiting for the bell; when I’m ready to bolt from my chair; when I’m watching the clock. Then, I admit to it even if the impatience feels childish, as if I can’t abide being thwarted. “It’s time to move!”

I’m not saying it’s a virtue not to bolt or that it would be better to run when the urge strikes. I just figure a kid would forget about it the minute she was released. I’ve got to work at it. Take a break to slough off the feeling. To excuse myself for feeling the way I do. That’s what the kids don’t have to do. They’ll sit wiggling and toe tapping in their chairs and leap from them with glee. They know they’re being thwarted. We adults see toddlers and emergency rooms and have to take a deep breath, plant our butts, still our feet, and call on patience to still our minds. “Here Patience! Come girl!”

You want to never feel the sting of wanting release, of wanting to run off…free! You want to be free right there – right where you sit with the shoes or the socks or the crisis or the minutes ticking by. But you don’t feel free. You sit as still as if you’re hand-cuffed and breathe deeply and call yourself impatient and go somewhere after to shake it off.

I discovered a lot of acceptance for my experience of life through A Course of Love. I’ve been on that acceptance path a long time. “Okay. I’m impatient. Big deal.” I admit things like that all over the place, just as I did to Donny. But I’ve been realizing lately that acceptance has made me a little lazy or maybe imprecise about my words. What if I’m accepting being impatient when I’m really calling on grace?

You could replace “impatient” with “I call on grace,” if that’s what you do. Maybe that’s the thing about affirmations that I’ve never gotten. Maybe they are meant to tell you what you really do rather than to fake you out.