PATIENCE is not among my weekly calendar notations:
The 26-hour Yom Kippur fast is over.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
The opening Presidential Debate of the season is history.
Colleagues and students entered and left my Zoom rooms this week softened and strengthened by practice and by sharing struggles and wisdom.
A passion-project that has been on hold for some weeks moved a little.
Tomatoes that have been hanging green on the vine have suddenly reddened in the cooling, shortening daylight hours.
This list almost but not quite attains what my teacher Jason Shulman calls “the pure subjective,” a quality of is-ness that such statements display when they are just themselves. As you read through that list, you can pick up whiffs of preference and comparison and judgment that leave them short of “is-ness.”
I consider again the card I pulled for my High Holy Day focus this year: “patience.”
I am born an Aries, “the head” sign: I am a great sprinter. Marathons, not so much.
Can you tell from this post that this is a night when I am down to fumes?
Patience right now feels very close to: I am out of gas.
The Hebrew word for patience is transliterated as “savlanut.” It comes from a three-letter root meaning burden, load, suffering, pain: the same root of the words used to describe the hard labor of the enslaved Israelites making bricks from straw for Pharoah. Its linguistic cousins include: porter, stevedore, passivity, endurance, tolerance. You can see how these belong to the same word-family.
I’ve devoted myself more to cultivating resilience – the capacity to recover – than I have to bearing burdens. Maybe, I wonder to myself, if I practiced bearing burdens with more patience and tolerance and less suffering, I wouldn’t have to tend so much to recovering?
Meanwhile needs Urgent and Real compete for my attention and energies to:
– stay safe, keep others safe during the Pandemic, with my home serving as my workplace, since am both privileged and non-essential, a useful contemplation in itself when I have more brain cells to rub together.
– do/be/ join forces for equity: safety and protection under the law and access and well-being for people who have black and brown and olive skins
– figure out how to vote and maximize the chances that my vote will be counted. I already know my vote counts. This year I also have to do what I can to make sure it is counted. This is a new experience for me as a White person.
– plant seeds for collective civic grieving, repair of wrongs, and reconciliation. To lift my spirits, I’m putting a pin in this topic for a future post.
What you have just read is a narration of my practice of letting myself be the size I am. Which is what I counsel you to do .....during these times and ever after:
Do what you can from where you are, with what you have to work with.
If you’re tired, rest.
If you’re hungry, eat.
If you feel defeated, do a small kindness for someone.
If you’re full of pep, or you have “discretionary” dollars, choose who and what gets the benefit.
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