How hard is it to be patient?
I’ll tell you how hard, it’s utterly excruciating.
Right now my life is very quiet. It feels as though I’m watching it from the sidelines like a ballplayer forced to sit on the bench in the ninth inning.
Everyone else’s life is in full swing while mine waits for further instructions.
I feel left behind.
I’m the first one to be happy for others. I just wish they could be more sensitive towards me and my present state but alas, this simply is never the case. They preen in their good luck as you bleed in their presence since, as it was explained to me, you’re the farthest thing from their mind.
Just this morning a woman, after meeting her on the street listening to her slew of recent lucrative jobs, emailed me to say perhaps I should go be a receptionist or hostess at a restaurant…a good one of course…until life, as she put it, picks up.
Oh, in other words, I shouldn’t apply my copious skills at The Pastami Queen but aim for someplace higher, like The Shake Shack…is that what you mean? I could give make-up tips at the table.
Well that picked me right up.
So deciding to forgo that encouraging suggestion, I sit and wait for a shift to occur on its own trying not to imagine the worst. When you’re Italian that’s a challenge alright since catastrophic thinking is in your blood.
I remember as a kid watching my grandmother stock canned goods in the basement for when the bomb its. If it were me, I would have lined those shelves with Hershey Bars, but who asks a kid and her Chatty Cathy doll what they think?
I do know, being an alumni of worry, that it can alter our perceptions until we lose all sense of what’s really happening turning neutral situations into nightmares. Suddenly you’re in a full blown sweat at 3 in the morning clutching your quilt for dear life. If it could talk it would say, hey, you’re killing me Susannah. Relax that grip girl before you shred me to death.
All we have is today, the first thing they teach you in 12 Step. By living in the future you rob yourself of this 24 hours that could be spent in peace and joy.
Fat chance, I tell myself as I grind my teeth staring at my unpaid credit cards that got out of hand at Christmas.
My inner voice, the one that sounds like Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary whispers, work will come, those bills will be paid…when have you ever not paid a bill…and rather than force a solution, maybe it would behoove you madam if you stayed where your feet are and reveled in the now.
How does that sound?
Okay Ingrid, I guess I’ll get up and wash my face…throw on some jeans and mosey out to watch the sunrise.
That does sound better than shredding my quilt.
You made a great a nun by the way. 
SB
