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I have a friend and she has two sets of what look like playing cards, called Life Cards and Angel Cards. Every once in awhile, she drags them out of the cupboard and we pick one of each (without looking). It’s something that takes about 10 minutes but it is an exercise that drags us back into the present moment and gives us the chance to shift our (usually) future-focused perspectives.

In fact, we have turned this into a semi-weekly fun thing to do so we remember to make time for reflection and pausing in our lives.

Anyhow. This week I pulled the revelation card and the patience card. Every week I seem to pull a card that applies to my life in that particular moment and this week’s choices were scarily relevant. It is also a theme that seems to keep playing over and over in my life. Wait, slow down, let things resolve themselves. I think this theme keeps playing over and over because I haven’t gotten it yet.

The revelation card told me that I should wait for life to reveal itself to me and the patience card just said patience. Patience while I wait for life to reveal itself I guess. Isn’t that weird how these two cards go together ? Completely separate decks. Eerie.

I am not patient and I hate waiting. I like to control the outcome.

What about you?

Are you the type of person that likes to sort life into neat piles and bend it the way you want it to go? Do you look at a problem and immediately start thinking of how you are going to fix that problem? Do you create mental deadlines about when that has to happen by?

I am that type of person and that is what I do.

I am also a bit of a stress case.

I noticed that my tendency to sort life into neat little boxes would just lead me to feeling frustrated when nothing fit.

I noticed that life never matched what my future focus had envisioned.

I would kill myself over work deadlines, stressing out myself and my kids, only to have the work deadline move or not matter anymore. Or the project I was working on would change so dramatically, that the work I had done was no longer relevant.

Logically, I now know this: life never plays out how you expect it will and even if I throw all my energy at something, it is not going to go the way I planned. What I have also learned is that I can handle everything that does come my way. So I can relax, I can take my time and try to live a life according to my own values and beliefs. I can gather information and gain new insight into things but in the end it is the interplay between the circumstances and the people in my life that determines what will be revealed. I know this,  yet I don’t live as if I do.

I was just reminded of this when I looked in my oldest son’s bedroom. It is a disaster zone. As usual. Added to the piles of detritus on the floor are all the candy wrappers from this most recently ended Halloween. He likes to save them to remind himself of the good times gone by I guess.

I immediately started grumbling and complaining, saying things like ‘these have got to go.” and “this room is a disaster – you have to clean up.” and he mumbled “I will.”

Yeah – he won’t. He won’t because I never let him get to that point. I start freaking out and yelling until  he grudgingly tidies his room.

I’m going to try something different (and all because of those cards). I’m going to be patient and let life reveal itself to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I still want to control the outcome. What I’m hoping will happen is what happened to some friends of mine. In their early twenties they started living together as a couple. One of them was not what you would consider  to be a tidy person.

This couple had been living together for about two years. They were living the pattern where their home would get more and more slovenly until the tidier person would freak out and clean up. This kept happening. The tidier person could not wait, she’d reached her limit.

But after two years, I guess she reached her limit on the number of times she could freak out and be upset with the slob she was living with. She was tired of all the arguing. So she stopped. She waited to see what would reveal itself. I love this story.

Well, their place got really bad. Really really bad. Dogs would come over to visit and find a good meal in itself on the floor.

It got so bad, one day, unbelievably, the person who seemed to have no limit to his tolerance for mess, stood in the middle of the room, lifted his arms to the sky and went “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!”

He’d noticed the mess.

He started to clean the mess. All without any yelling or cajoling from his partner.

Since that time, he’s never let things go so far again.

So, I’m hoping I can last as long as my friend (which could be a very long time) but I am also curious to see what will be revealed.  How will this play out? Will there be a different outcome? Will it make for as good a story?

I’m hopeful that training myself to wait on minor life situations will help me develop a waiting muscle that I can use on the seemingly more serious situations in life.

This is going to be my challenge to myself for the next little while. Will you join me in this challenge? Will you wait to see what is revealed?