The Thing About Patience

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come. --Robert H. Schuller

February on Vancouver Island is a funny time of year. We are fortunate to have a mild climate here, but it tends to give you a bit of false confidence. Only last weekend, I was walking around the marina in the sunshine. It was too warm for my hat and I think I could have worn a lighter coat. I paid a visit to the gallery and happened to glance out one of their windows to marvel at the warm sunshine:

And today, well...

Even my indoor plants looked disappointed:

Speaking of: this is my orchid. I've been working on it for the past three years, trying to get it to bloom. It's been showing buds since Christmas, and this morning it looked like this:

Only a little while later I discovered that the flower spike had snapped. Three years of waiting, just gone in an instant. It's been a long time since I've felt that specific kind of disappointment.

I find myself sort of floating along these days, which is why I haven't posted anything on this blog for the past couple of weeks. I felt the need to be silent, to wait until I had words to say. It's been a strange time for me since I've moved to my new job. I'm settling in, finding some sort of a rhythm, getting to know things, cleaning up messes that were left before me, creating my own ways of doing things... and yet, I feel a bit groundless. My previous job took up so much of my life and so much of my energy that not being there anymore is not as freeing as I thought it would be. I finish my days a bit earlier, but I seem to have so much more time, and this is unreasonably unsettling for me. Maybe it's because I'm not carrying so much of my work inside my mind and body anymore. This way of living seems like a past memory... a vague dream coming back to become reality again. I feel like I've leaped backward in time and got my sleeve stuck in the time machine. And there's no manual for that kind of thing.

I'm trying to be patient with myself, to remind myself that I worked there for nearly five years, so it's going to take more than a few weeks to find my way again. I'm still struggling to get back into a regular gym routine, and my body is impatient to get moving again. But somehow, something deep inside of me is telling me to wait, whispering to me to be patient, that there's no point trying to rush into some kind of impossible state of normalcy, some state of false perfection. I made a cottage pie this morning and it overflowed. I shrugged my shoulders and poured myself another bowl of cereal. We'll call that stage one of being patient... or at the very least, calm.

And then yes, there's the knitting:

If there's one way to learn patience, it's trying to knit a fabric out of cobweb laceweight merino. The photo above was taken last week, and even with all my newly found spare time, it hasn't grown much since then. I was telling a friend about it the other day, and she asked me if I was liking the pattern.

I said, "I think it will be nice once it's finished. So will the flying cars."

I'm wondering if I'll have to break my monogamous knitting rule and go make something out of some super bulky yarn for a while, but in my heart I know I will carry on trudging through this until it's finished. I'm pretty sure it'll be worth it. All of this patience... it's gotta pay off sometime.

Here's hoping. Have a good week.