I am patient

I can hear the guffaws from here. They’re coming from everyone who knows me, but most loudly from Cameron and my mother. Patience? Are you kidding me?

The guffaws are justified. I am impatient in my everyday life. Extremely impatient.

I’m the person in the queue talking loudly about how long the person in front of me is taking, hoping they’ll get the hint and move on. I march walk very fast through shopping centres, down the street, and everywhere, barely looking around me in an effort to just get where I’m going as quickly as possible. In my chocolate-consuming days, a recipe to make 12 cookies would make three, because I would eat half of the mixture, then eat half of the still soft cookies before they had finished baking in the oven.

But Ashleigh brings out a patient side I never knew I had.

Somehow, now, it’s okay that it takes fifteen minutes to put on a pair of shoes. It’s okay that every rock, leaf and flower we pass has to be picked up and examined on the way to the park. It’s okay that each grape has to be fed to one doll, then another, then another before Ashleigh finally eats it. It’s okay that we have to read A Particular Cow or The Saggy Baggy Elephant eight times before moving on to the next story. (It’s less okay when it’s Little Miss Giggles or Snow White.)

Unfortunately, my patience is mostly limited to Ashleigh. But I’ll practice. I’ll do my ‘patience exercises’ and see how I go applying it to other areas of my life.

Any tips? Are you a patient person, or do you have to force yourself to take deep, calming breaths when things get a bit tricksy?