Since Christmas I have been saving my money to buy a bedding set from Anthropologie. They are quite pricey but they are beautiful, well made and so soft; I found one on their website that seemed to fit my style and personality and so I faithfully kept my eye on it as I continued tucking money away. Then the text came from my sister-in-law that it was finally “Anthro-days” which meant that members got 20% off; it was finally time to buy this beautiful bedding set. It was already in my cart, all I needed to do was hit the “purchase” button; I smiled with excitement when I did.
I was dismayed to see a message pop up on my screen that the beautiful quilt I was ordering was on back order and wouldn’t ship until the end of July. I quickly scrolled through the other bedding sets on the site to see if perhaps I should order a different one— which only confirmed that this was the one that I wanted—so I indicated that I was ok waiting until the summer; I had already waited 3 months, what was another few months going to hurt?
A few days later the pillow shams that were a part of the bedding set arrived at my door; I admired their beauty but was simultaneously sad that I would have to wait another four months to complete the set. A week later I checked my bank account and noticed that the remaining amount of the order total had been charged to my card. This could only mean one thing: somehow the quilt wasn’t back ordered and it was about to ship! I checked my Anthropologie account and to my delight it was preparing for shipment—in two days it was going to be on my doorstep!
Out of sheer giddiness I checked the tracker the next day and saw that the delivery date had been moved back a week. A week? How could I stand to wait another week for this quilt? It seemed like such a long time (and I realize even as I am writing this how overly dramatic I sound, but these were really the thoughts going on in my head!) I checked back every day, multiple times per day even, to see where it was at in the shipping process, what part of the country my quilt had traveled to that day and crossed my fingers as I hoped to see that perhaps the delivery date had been moved up. No such luck. The UPS gods didn’t seem to feel my quilt delivery was as urgent as I did.
In moments of reflection (or maybe sanity?) it has struck me as odd how impatient I was about this quilt. Just a few weeks ago I thought this quilt would arrive as a belated birthday gift and I was prepared, and willing, to wait. But the possibility (and now reality) of it being here months sooner somehow decreased my ability to wait and my gut reaction was “what’s wrong with me?”
I have always been told that patience is a virtue. Patience has always been a characteristic that I have admired and desired to cultivate in my own life. In many ways, patience seems to be my middle name.
Being patient is one of the bedrocks of being a therapist; I go at the speed my client needs to go at rather than the speed I would prefer. I remember, after observing one of my sessions, my intern told me “how can you be so patient with her? Don’t you want to just tell her the answer?” It was true, I could have told her the answer that she was looking for. It would have been much easier (and likely could have saved her some time and money in therapy), but part of my need to be patient was so that she could figure out the answer herself. Only by providing a space to be patient and free of hurrying was she going to be able to come to a lasting and meaningful conclusion herself.
As a young adult I used to pray for patience. I chuckle now that I felt so urgent about praying for patience—obviously if you are praying for patience there is something that you need to be patient for. Back then I was praying for patience to wait for my future husband. As a newly graduated high school senior, I had no idea that patience might mean 15+ years of waiting! I don’t pray for patience in that area anymore—I pray for an expedited process!
Perhaps it was the culture I grew up in, the stigma around stating what you really needed or wanted or the societal push towards hyper-independence, but somewhere along the way I started to believe that part of being patient meant denying the feelings and the process that went along with it. In my mind, praying for my future husband was supposed to somehow make it easier to be single or it should take away any lingering frustration that all of my friends were planning weddings and I was instead picking out bridesmaid dresses with them.
In those moments feeling the frustration or downright denying that I had any sort of negative thoughts and emotions towards the situation(s) only made patience feel that much more unattainable. The harder I tried to ignore what I actually wanted and the more I tried to shove my emotions under the rug, the more of a struggle it was to actually embody this quality that I was praying for.
What I have come to realize is this: my impatience for my quilt coming isn’t some sort of a character defect. It doesn’t mean that I am overly anxious or materialistic. My impatience comes from the fact that I am so excited about this quilt and what it represents. It was chosen carefully, it was well thought out and planned for and it was all about delayed gratification. It is one of the first purchases I have made for myself in which I wasn’t trying to simply get a deal or make due with the cheaper or knock off version of something even though I didn’t really like it as much as the original, more expensive version. The colors and pattern represent something about me and the season of life I am in; placing it on my bed pulls my room together in a way that is appealing to me rather than waiting to decorate in a way that is pleasing to the eye until I am sharing my bedroom with someone else. It’s about the quilt but it’s so not about the quilt.
I’ve caught myself many times over the past week telling myself to calm down, reassuring myself that Wednesday will get here before I know it and I need to just think about something else. I am well aware that my strong desire for my quilt to get here is not actually going to speed up the process. But I am also realizing that trying to forget about it or give myself mental pep talks doesn’t necessarily make me feel better either.
Melanie Beattie, in her book “The Language of Letting Go”, said, “do not confuse the suggestion to be patient with the old rule about not having feelings.”
It has taken me a long time to give myself permission to accept the combination of patience and emotions. Like the song that my mother sang to us growing up, I immediately associated impatience with anxiety; there were many verses in the Bible that told us we weren’t supposed to worry, what we were supposed to do with our anxieties and the inverse assumption that if you were worrying there was something that you were trying to control (and therefore not fully trusting God). I think I likely prayed for patience in waiting [for my future husband] so that I wouldn’t be seen by others as being untrusting. Or in the case of my quilt, demonstrating patience somehow nurtured fears I might have about being materialistic or vain.
But at the bottom of all of it is this: being patient isn’t about trying to pretend that everything is ok and that you like waiting for the thing you are waiting for. Patience doesn’t mean that the thing you are waiting for is delayed so that you really learn your lesson. Patience doesn’t mean I can’t anticipate, wish for or be excited for what is coming. Patience likely will require
It’s funny how much you can learn about yourself when you purchase a quilt. Seriously though, tomorrow needs to hurry up and get here…
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