You Be You & I Will Be Me

How great is it that there are countless mentors, inspirational people, role models & people that we admire!  There may be aspects of the behaviours of some of these people that we may choose to emulate.  Are there times where you find yourself asking yourself if there is something that you want to develop or grow within yourself?  This is a continuous journey for me.  A couple of years ago I made a concerted effort to try to grow more in the virtues.  Okay, so when I got to the virtue of patience I really found myself proceeding very slowly.  I had my own plan complete with completion dates to get through the virtues.  If only life were as simple as us doing just that.  Realizing quickly that the over achiever in me was setting me up for a big fail I decided that working on growing in the virtues was still a great thing for me to pursue yet the dates that I had placed on this was not only unrealistic but also perhaps kind of silly.  I am really not in charge of the dates on this one.  The actions & the effort, yes, I am responsible for yet beyond that, I surrender the dates to exactly who is in charge of that.  I know that patience is not my strong suit by any stretch of the imagination so you better believe that I did not begin with that one.  Instead, I put it at the mid-way point on my growth journey as far as the virtues of:  love, joy, peace, gentleness, patience, goodness, faithfulness & self-control go.  I like to call that the sandwich approach to life.  I like to start with something that is already naturally there, then work into the middle with something that I need a huge amount of work on & then end with things that are not too much of a stretch because I am wired for a happy ending so I always build one into my life daily.

My personal viewpoint is that if I want to get better at anything in life then I am going to need some training from someone who is already good at the thing I am working on.  As I threw myself full force into growing in each of the virtues, a face or several faces even would come into perfect focus in my mind.  These would be the faces of people that I was certain had mastered the virtue I was working on.  I would look to these people as guides either simply by watching them…their examples in action of the virtue and/or I would ask them questions.  Once I got to the mid-point or the filling to the sandwich as I like to call it, there it was, patience.  Yikes, I knew this was a biggy for me.  To sit quietly & ask myself how I am doing with patience & answer with raw honesty was humbling.  Instantly, I knew I was in for a good kind of challenge because patience is the virtue that I have struggled with throughout life.  Not to blame the culture of today, but rather to be mindful is helpful to me I have found.  What I am getting at is that it is a fast paced culture.  Two years ago our family was still on dial up internet.  And the only “i” device that I owned were 2 “iballs”up until 2 years ago as well.  Sure, I had my old trusty flip phone that I referred to as “Rusty” the classic.  Then our family entered into the new millennium albeit 12 years late.  It did not take long though for me to find that I was even more impatient than ever before even when we got onto high speed internet & I updated my cell at long last & wait times were incrementally improved from the years prior.  There was this type of mentality within me that wanted to do even more things at once even faster & it was a real pain in the neck when our computer would glitch and line ups got on my nerves like never before.  The faster we could move due to modern conveniences, the more impatient I found myself until I started noticing this trend within me & that my state of peacefulness had been replaced with a stressed out version of myself that I was not going to continue to allow.  Once I identify problems in my life, I go into creative problem solving.  And one of the solutions is that I set limits for myself on how much time I will allow myself to be on my cell phone or pc each day.  Some days I give myself a full day time out from internet.  And I miss it & start kind of “jonesing” for it but too much of anything can be addictive I have found.  Going out of balance is so easy unless I am mindful of this daily.  Today a lovely lady pointed out to me that if we each took the steps to really look after ourselves we would be a lot better off.  She provided an example of a person who looks after his health, spirit & soul daily with incredible care.  He then shares the best of himself with others & is incredibly peaceful as a result of the daily choices that he makes.  He has a series of daily good habits & he has a great outlook on life & I have not seen him stressed out in the 7 years that I have known him.  There is no way that he has a less bumpy life than most yet it is in how he looks at things & deals with stress that keeps him calm & peaceful even in the midst of chaos & strife. 

I will share with you that I am still “stuck” on patience because I know that I have not grown enough in that area to “graduate” to working on the next virtue.  And I have been stuck now on patience for about 2 years.  When I first began my working harder on patience, I saw the humour in the fact that I decided that I would begin this endeavor by purchasing a recommended book on achieving more patience in daily life.  The book was on backorder & then was discontinued & to make a long story short, I finally managed to purchase a second hand copy six months later.  The day that I began trying to read it, I was at the blood lab at 7:30am in the morning waiting in a line behind about 35 people to get a fasting blood sugar lab for my A1C done.  Each time that I would start to read a sentence, the gentleman in front of me kept asking me questions & engaging me in conversation.  After a few tries at reading I realized that my motto is “people before things” & that this gentleman wanted to talk & this was evident so it was time to show him a human level of respect & put the book away & listen to him instead.  I was very glad that I did since he had so many interesting stories to share & we ended up having a very Dear person in common (my Godfather) & we ended up having quite a hoot together while we both waited almost an hour for our turn at the lab.  While I have made significant progress with patience over the past couple of years, I am truthful with myself that I still have a long way to go since I don’t naturally practice patience consistently.  Traffic is a great example.  Being in a traffic jam brings out the impatience big time in me.  I realize that I am making a choice to get frustrated versus choosing something better for myself like putting a cd in & listening to something wonderful instead & focusing on that or something else.  Dealing with people who take a minimalistic approach to life derails my patience progress big time.  The list is still pretty long so I will stop there.  Suffice to say that I realistically see myself working on greater patience for a very long time & that is okay & I do see some wee bits of progress.  That is better to have snail pace progress than not to bother with growth at all & see no progress or even regression.  That is just the way I look at it. 

 I find that I have made some progress in the area of patience with living my life with type 1 diabetes.  Beeping noises, having to check my blood sugars at certain times, going to the blood lab and the waiting for A1C results for a week or two, waiting for low blood sugars to come back up & high blood sugars to go back down & all the countless frustrations of type 1 are things that for the most part I have experienced significant progress in as far as patience is concerned thankfully.  That took effort though just like doing all the things that we need to do to take care of type 1 also takes enormous effort.  Progress has been made in my own way & I look forward to being able to see in time & with effort greater attitudes of taking even type 1 in stride.  In the meantime, it is what it is & that is okay because I am trying.

Another thing that has helped me immensely in staying committed to making progress with patience is the quiet time that I schedule in for myself at least once a week.  Not only has that helped with patience, but it has inadvertently helped with every single one of the virtues.  I realize that I am not going to reach any level of perfection in any of the virtues or even most things in life.  Instead, I look at it as an approach towards a messy perfection or roughly right approach.  One of the things that I like to have on hand to quieten my mind since it loves to race in a zillion directions left to its own tendencies is to have a book on hand that corrals my thoughts & helps me to focus on quiet presence.  I love books so I always rotate the book that is being used at the beginning of some quiet time.  Today, I picked up a lovely book that I have had for about a year.  I have not yet made it all the way through the book but it is not a race towards patience of course.  It is the opposite right?  Today, I read day 7 out of “Set Your Heart Free.”  The book is cool in that you receive a centering thought for the morning to start the day off with & then there is just one short sentence that pertains to the hours throughout the day & then there is a short summary at the end of the day before bed.  I will admit that I am pretty good about reading & digesting the morning thought & I usually think about it throughout the day but I fall down on usually getting to the before bed summary.  I am most definitely a morning person so by bedtime I am in near zombie state & would generally fall asleep mid sentence if I read in any other posture than standing straight up.  So 2 out of 3 is better than 0 out of 3 is my attitude.  One day I will get to 3 out of 3 but I do not beat myself up over the 2 out of 3 currently because I need to also have patience with myself.

Have you asked yourself how it is going for you where the patience towards yourself goes?  Do you find you have oodles more patience for everyone else & a minisule amount for yourself?  That is what I found.  I decided to work on changing that too.  If type 1 is beating up on my body or I am having a roller coaster blood sugar ride that I did not ask to have, I try my best to be a little more gentle with myself.  It is a work in progress & that’s okay too…at least it is progress a little at a time.

We are each beautiful originals so what works for me will not necessarily be the answer for you & vice versa & that is okay.  Today’s thought as outlined in the guiding though in the book I mentioned for today is essentially to live the purpose each one of us was placed upon the earth to live.  It goes on to basically say that there is no use being a perfect carbon copy of someone else but rather to be a fully passionate & engaged you or me.  You cannot serve my purpose & I cannot serve yours & that is a great thing.  So yes for sure I love to look to mentors, inspirational examples & people who are shining in any given virtue.  Then I take that example & give it my messy “me” ness & live it out as me instead of trying to be a carbon copy of someone else.  We each put our own paint brush on life & we each are a piece of a huge & beautiful puzzle in many ways.  How great is that!  The throughout the day thought in the book today is simple, “Be who you are!”  The idea is that we are being encouraged to be exactly ourselves & to fully embrace & let our talents bloom to share in the beautiful human puzzle.

My heart’s hope for you is that no matter what you are working towards growing in that you bring your “you” ness with you big time.  The world needs that!  The world needs you!

Smiles,

Saundie :)

Whether it is messy or imperfect patience or some other goal that we have set, it is the genuine trying that counts don't you think?  May your week ahead be filled with wee steps forward in the direction that you are focusing on in your life...the little steps add up over time.  Next week's story is "It is What it is."  :)