If you’re not willing to be patient you might find yourself missing out.
So often we want everything now and the idea of having to wait makes us anxious.
But remember that life is often like the quote, good things come to those who wait.
It’s not about making time for struggle or enduring something unpleasant hoping good will happen before you reach breaking point.
It’s about learning to be patient and not giving up just because things don’t happen straight away.
It’s been said that reassurance is something that we can’t get enough of. It’s strange to think about how we seek reassurance to keep our fears at bay but each time we get it we crave more and more often finding ourselves feeling stuck without it.
When you sit and watch a persons anxieties and fears play out in front of you, your immediate response is probably to console them with reassurance. You’ll find yourself saying things like ‘It’ll be alright’, it’s not necessarily because you believe it but instead because you don’t want them to feel low.
But reassurance is never enough so when the person continues on you might find yourself bored of the anxieties. It’s not that you don’t care but instead that you’ve accepted no amount of reassurance will change this persons mind so there’s no point in trying.
The lesson in all this is that sometimes people just want to vent, be heard and feel supported. Often that will work better to ease the anxieties rather than trying to use reassurance to make it go away.
You don’t have to resist or try to make it work, I promise you, it is okay.
Life is full of endings and new beginnings. But sometimes when things are getting to the end and we don’t know what is around the corner, we get nervous and become resistant.
We try to put the pieces back together instead of just clearing them to make way for the new.
It’s okay when it ends, not everything was meant to last forever.
It’s so interesting that often in different types of relationships we hold back instead from just being ourselves and allowing things to work out the way they’re meant to be.
You make a conscious effort to be less of yourself instead of just modelling what you want from your relationships. This choice leaves you feeling unfulfilled. You may end up finding yourselves in spaces you don’t want to be in, sometimes even with people you don’t really like because you have sacrificed your true self.
I think sometimes we’re scared to be ourselves for fear of rejection and so we wait for others to go first and be open. But if you find yourself in a space where you think you’ll be rejected for simply being yourself, then deep down (or maybe even just beneath the surface), you know that you’re somewhere you don’t really want to be.
Perhaps you want people in your life that you can be vulnerable with, yet when you have the opportunity to open up you choose to resist. And if the people around you aren’t being vulnerable with you, you end up feeling frustrated. But I think it’s fair to ask yourself, if you’re not willing to open up why should anyone else?
And in the grander scheme, if you aren’t willing to show up as your truest self in your relationships, why should you expect anyone else will?
Most people that you choose to have in your life are chosen because your lives or you as people align in some way.
It could be a similar taste in music, studying (or have studied) the same subjects, enjoying the same leisure activities, similar mindsets and worldviews or maybe you share the same aspirations.
Whatever it may be, when the base of your connection shifts it is likely that you may change your mind about having the person in your life.
Granted you will have built up a connection based on other things over time but when the core bits of you and a person no longer align, the relationship may no longer make sense.
This sort of thing quite commonly occurs once you begin to really figure out who you are and what you want in life. Perhaps the people you used to party with don’t really fit with the life you’re creating. Maybe your corporate aspirations clash with the aspirations of people around you to the point of causing disagreements.
Despite how it may feel, it’s a natural thing for relationships to change. It’s much better to allow things to be than to restrict your development or the development of someone else because you’d rather hold on to something that was never meant to last.
The idea of things not lasting, of things being temporary is often seen as a bad thing.
It’s seen as a failure.
We get caught up in this idea that if something is good it should last and if it doesn’t last then something was wrong.
I think the problem is that we find it hard to let go of a good thing, perhaps because we don’t believe their is more good things out there for us.
This idea of temporary things can be applied to many situations but lets take the example of friendship.
If you grow apart from someone who was once a close friend you can accept the situation or you can try to get back to the way things were. We idolise the past and try to force things to become what they once were.
I guess it’s difficult to accept that not everything was meant to last.
But in learning to accept temporary things you also open yourself up to some of life’s most beautiful moments.
This used to be one of my worst habits.
I’d do this thing where I’d place a lot of expectations on people that left no room for humanness and left me feeling disappointed.
Once I realised that I did this I started making a conscious effort to stop. I’ve learnt how to catch myself in the act and it is such a blessing. It means I’m much less bothered by what people do.
Letting go of expectation has made some relationships a lot easier. It has also helped me clarify that in some cases I’m more invested than the other person and that we should probably just part ways.
It’s also about balance. For example, expecting a friend to make time to see you is realistic but if you’re always expecting your friend to be free and getting upset or annoyed when they’re busy, you might want to reassess your expectations.
Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons a friend has taught me is to not take life so seriously and to laugh more at the ebb and flow of life.
Life is totally different when you’re willing to be less rigid and laugh at your experiences. When you’re hard on yourself for simply being a human that goes through a variety of experiences, life becomes hard.
But when you laugh and remind yourself that it’s all just a collection of experiences then life somehow softens towards you.
I recently bumped into someone that I hadn’t seen in 4 years. Sure we follow each other on social media but we don’t interact with each other much.
So what was so amazing is that things fell right into place as though no time had passed, in the best possible way.
This person even brought up the last time we met and I was surprised that they remembered it so well.
Anyway maybe I’m just getting old but I love that there are people in my life that I don’t see regularly but when I do see them, even though we’ve both changed, the relationship/connection still remains.
I guess this is just what happens you grow up.
I was reflecting on an old friendship recently and I realised how empty and almost meaningless it had become.
I think it’s difficult to let go of a friendship where the passing of time has changed the way things were.
But there’s only so much you can give and there’s only so much you should give before making peace with the way things are and moving on.
However I find myself battling the part of me that struggles to move on unless things have gone up in flames. Because until that point I feel like there is still a possibility that things can be salvaged.
So, here I am waiting for flames.
