Month: February 2017

Wait and see

~ Elizabeth W ~ Leave a comment

Waiting has never been my strong suit. Patience is not something I’m known for, outside of the teaching space. I harness a specific amount of patience and use it up between the hours of 8 and 4.

I want results immediately. I’ve always been this way, even before our high-tech instant gratification world. I can wait if I know there are results coming from beyond the horizon. No problem. But to wait and see if something, or anything will happen? Not how I roll.

For awhile I chastised myself for this quality of mine. I prayed for patience. And my friends, that’s exactly the last thing you want to do! Because you’ll be overwhelmed with opportunities to practice patience, and waiting-and-seeing. My grandmother and I always joked that it was the mantra of the Army: “Hurry up and wait”. How I learned that phrase all too well.

Waiting and seeing gets me all sorts of anxious. So to distract myself from the anxiety, I usually do two things at the same time: fidget, and get to the root of my anxiety.

Most of the time, the anxiety comes from the not knowing. And do I have a newsflash for you – this is life in a nutshell. Nothing is guaranteed, even when we set the S.M.A.R.T.est goals out there.

The other quality of ‘waiting and seeing’ that I just despise is its passivity. I like to do, do, do and doing nothing or being bored is my #1 pet peeve and fear in life. Sometimes I occupy my mind with other things while I’m waiting and seeing, and that feels much better.

While that feels better, is it really better? I think it’s healthy to have a level of go-get-it-ness in one’s life. How else would we work and eat and pay bills and… fill in the blank? But sometimes it is okay to sit back, watch, and wait to see what might happen next.

In this time we sit and wait, we can find healing. In my own journey, time really has been a factor in much of my healing. It’s an old adage, but it’s an old adage for a reason.

Finding our voices

~ Elizabeth W ~ Leave a comment

Every time I get the inspiration or urge to write, something stops me. It’s almost like a paralysis, but it’s completely intangible. I imagine it’s a bit like being under anesthesia, able to feel but unable to speak. Actually, that’s exactly what it is.

Two years of hopefulness followed by hopelessness ad nauseum can really render someone speechless. Screaming on the inside but unable to formulate shapes with the mouth and vibrations with the vocal chords.

There’s so much to say and nothing at all. Some days I feel like an old woman, content to sit in the silence, meditating or pondering the rays of light that come through the window. I move slow, think slower, and hours can go by with nothing more than a few sentences loosely parsed together.

I’m trying to find my place in the world. I feel like part of my soul is missing some of the time. At almost 31, I’m established in my career but not necessarily because this was my goal. I fell into career success. Great, right? Kind of.

Nevertheless, every day in my care are 20 children, ages 5 to 10, all learning English and finding their place in the world, too. They’ve been my focus of whatever maternal instinct has survived this descent. I cherish their smiles and hugs, and their insightful and goofy anecdotes about life. I help them write, putting the words on the page. And in helping them find their voices, I’m finding mine too.