The Journey or hurry up and be patient already….

By June 2, 2015Learning

 

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you. ( excerpt from David Whyte’s poem The Journey)

I’ve been writing a book for the last 21 years… yes, really.

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. “~Albert Einstein

It is a collection of my family stories. “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner~stories of a seared childhood” will be published next April, 2016 by Familius Publishers. I am in the final stages of editing with just two stories to tweek before I’m done with the writing process. These final changes to two short stories bring the overarching emotional arc of the entire book to a place of rest. But…the one line inside of me hasn’t been inscribed across the sky yet and I wait patiently to return to these two stories that pull the whole thing together for Wednesday’s deadline. I’ve learned alot while writing this book. The greatest lesson I’ve learned is to be patient, to wait, to work persistently and to let something come to me rather than chasing it down with a baseball bat in my hand.

To know how to wait is the great secret of success. — JOSEPH MARIE DE MAISTRE

“Patience is the quality that brings about inner peace, and together with perseverance, brings about success in whatever endeavor we choose to undertake.” http://www.theosophy.ph/trans_29.htm

I am not by nature a patient person. I prefer to push my way through things and make round pegs fit into square holes. I like it NOW… but writing, like life, isn’t that way. It requires patience and persistence and a willingness to see what line is written inside of you.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”― Rainer Maria Rilke

Things take time. Maturity takes time. I’ve had to accept that I couldn’t write this book any faster because I had to live the questions of ancestry and identity, fate and faith first.I’m learning to be patient one story at a time, one question at a time, one problem at a time.