Patience, Presence, Peace: The Eighth Annual Obligatory New Year’s Post

My “nudge” words for 2025 are patience, presence, and peace.

Those seem pretty simple, right?

Not for me, they’re not. Every one of those things requires a lot of work for me.

I am not a patient person.

I talk fast. I interrupt people. I even finish their sentences, never expecting to be wrong about where they were heading. To my ear, other people’s verbal expression often sounds like a performance of Bob and Ray’s famous “slow talkers of America” routine:

It takes a lot of effort for me to sit through what someone else is saying when the whole time I think I already know what’s coming, so can’t they just GET TO THE POINT, ALREADY so we can move this conversation forward?

I also have a habit of jumping in to take over and finish a task I think someone is doing too slowly, or just wrong. I did this on a plane once, when two young women boarded late, right before the cabin doors were to close, and took an interminable time trying to find an overhead bin in which to stow their luggage. As they came down the aisle toward their seats, they kept opening and rejecting bins that clearly had enough space in them for their bags, but they just couldn’t SEE it.

When they reached the bins above the row opposite me, I couldn’t stand it anymore: I unbuckled, jumped out of my seat, opened a bin, shoved the soft-sided luggage that was in there aside, grabbed the women’s suitcases, and easily hoisted them into the bin. I slammed it shut, plopped myself back in my seat, buckled up, and nearly said something like “let’s light this candle!” or “let’s go, already!” The stunned young women recovered enough to thank me, and a woman across the aisle leaned over and remarked, “you must fly a lot.”

Yes, at that stage of my life I did, and while I’m sure the other passengers appreciated me “helping” the women stow their bags and get moving to their seats so we could depart, it took years for me to realize that I didn’t even say “here, let me help you.” I just jumped in and took over, with no effort to disguise my irritation. So in providing a service I also dropped a big load of judgment, designed to ensure these young women would realize how DIM WITTED and UNOBSERVANT I thought they had been. Nice, Annie. So nice.

Meantime, I assume that my communication, when I graciously bestow it upon others, is exquisitely precise, specific, eloquent, and even pithy.

Anyone who has ever heard me talk is rolling their eyes or guffawing right now. “Pithy” is not a word they would ever apply to my way of speaking — or writing, I suppose. But I’m working on it!

So one of my nudges for 2025 is going to be “patience.” I’m going to try to listen three times more than I speak (HA! I think that was one of my “revolutions” in a past year, that didn’t go so well. OK, I said try). I’ll try to refrain from finishing other people’s sentences, or their tasks, when they haven’t asked me for help.

Patience is closely related to presence. By presence I mean really being here with whomever I’m with, not three steps ahead in my mind, doing something I want to do after I’ve dismissed (been dismissive to, behaved dismissively toward) the other person. I want to be one of those people who makes others feel seen, heard, and appreciated, and stifle the impulse to inject my ego and sense of superiority (how charming) all the time.

Then there’s peace. By this I mean being at peace with my life as it is, not as I think it should be or even should have been. I can’t change the past, so regretting it is a waste of time and energy. My Mother died eleven years ago. There’s nothing I can do to please her now (and nothing I did or accomplished ever did please her when she was living, either, really). I want to accept myself as I am, and my life as it is now, without constantly thinking that I should be doing, or being, something else.

Dammit, I want to be positively serene. I’m going to serene the absolute fuck out of 2025. Pretty damn, serene, huh?

But if I can get anywhere close to that kind of peace (or acceptance), patience and presence will follow. I think. I hope.

Working on patience, presence, and peace, I remain,

Your chronically impatient, not-really-here-right-now, too-focused-on-regrets, to-do’s and checking-thing-off-lists to be peaceful, but promising to work on achieving serenity,

Ridiculouswoman