Something resembling patience

Patience is not one of my strong points. I figured this out only a few years ago, in a moment of deep personal insight.

“I think I’m not actually a very patient person,” I said to my husband, to inform him of both my enormous capacity for meaningful introspection, and the startling fact that I might not be 100 percent stoic and serene.

He looked at me, a little bemused. “You are the most impatient person I have ever met,” he said, all matter-of-fact. “Did you only just realise this?”

Better late, though, than never. When I acknowledge my impatience, I can turn my attention from wishing everything would just happen now, please, already, to something else entirely. I am no more patient than I was before, but I can consciously choose to distract myself.

So I visualise my life as a wall of wheels: big wheels, little wheels, cogs and gears, all turning at different speeds. I give my attention to those I can hurry, and try not to think about the others turning slowly at their own pace in the background.

With a picture book on its way to publication, there are long stretches of time when the story I wrote is in someone else’s capable hands. I get glimpses of its progress now and then, and they are enormously exciting, but I can’t hurry the process. This is one of the big wheels in the background.

So I have turned my attention to several unfinished stories, and I am having a whole lot of fun revising them. I recently finished one manuscript, and set another big, slow wheel turning by submitting it to a publisher. While I wait potentially months for a response, I have another story in the last stages of polishing, and a couple more plotted out and ready for some real attention. These unfinished manuscripts are the busy little projects that I can focus on in the meantime, and they bring me great joy.

On a very small scale, I exercise patience by putting aside drafts that look finished. As much as I might want to submit them somewhere, I will almost always see room for improvement after some time away from the text. I have accepted this step as a vital part of my writing process, but still I like to get on with newer work so that I can ignore those drafts for as long as I need to.

Having several projects on the go at once, all in different stages, is a way of managing my attention. It doesn’t always work, because it is not true patience. It is a deliberate illusion, and it flickers a bit, but it helps.