Patience

Good things come to those who wait, they say.

But damn, we hate waiting.

With seemingly everything we need just a touch of a button away today, we become prisoners of impatience when we cannot access the answers we crave.

We wish the roads of life were splattered with billboards alerting us to our final destinations laying just around the bend. I’m constantly stressed about my future and often wish to see giant signs advertising everything that’s going to happen in the next phase of my life.

When we venture down untraveled roads, we turn to our GPS to dictate a crystal clear A-to-B route to us. Just follow my path, the automated voice tells us, and we’ll arrive at our destination with ease.

Only if it were that simple in the real world.

The truth is, our life’s journey is so long. It’s never as simple as Point A to Point B because of all the different metaphorical bumps in the road that present themselves. Therefore we arrive at our destinations, the ones we’ve dreamt about since our youth, often via a completely different route than the one we intended.

When we graduate from college and enter the so-called “real world,” we expect everything to come quickly to us because well, that’s the way it generally is in adolescence. We'll find a job a month or two after crossing the stage. We'll spend a year or two at that bottom-of-the-barrel "foot in the door" place. And then we'll certainly have an overwhelming amount of options to choose from because everyone will want us, right? And we'll find our ideal life partner in that time also, right? And then, by age 25, we'll have everything figured out, right?

Wrong.

As I’ve quickly discovered, no matter how much we excel, upward mobility moves at a glacier-like pace. Our savings accounts don’t accumulate as quickly as they once did now that we’re responsible for paying rent and student loans. Employers don’t promote us every six months or care about our development as much as our parents, teachers, coaches and other mentors once did. And god, dating outside of a school atmosphere presents a whole world of challenges unseen before in our lives.

We must push the dreams of our future to the back of our minds and stress that we’ll get there one day, but it will just take a long time. Ater all, nothing worth having comes quickly or easily. We can’t stew in frustration over our snail-like-paced development; instead, we need to embrace the possibilities of the present moment while also keeping our Personal Legends close to heart.

Do this, and one day, the bumps and bruises you incur along the way will not derail you. Like the calluses on the carpenter’s hands, you will eventually become numb to the hardships and accept them as a necessary evil. Just persevere through it and one day, somewhere in the future, you’ll stare in amazement at the mesmerising structure you’ve just created.

It will happen. Just be patient.