Patience

A warm, but bulky coat. Gloves. A wool hat. DataWatch card on a lanyard. Office door keys. Laptop backpack. A Baja Fresh bag with a chicken rice bowl. A grande Pike Place blend cup of Starbucks coffee. A walking stick.

That’s what I wore and retrieved from my car in the parking lot at work late one recent morning. It was 11 degrees outside, 43 in the parking lot.

Many people I know think I have a lot of patience, that I’m calm under pressure and that I don’t get angry very often. My take? I have plenty of ‘acceptance’; but the older I get, the less patience I have. And the more often I am angry.

Maybe ‘patience’ should be my keyword for 2018. That would be a worthy goal.

A moment before I struggled to exit my car, strap on all my crap and head for the elevator, I told myself I should take my time and accept that it’s cold, I have several items to take up to my office and I’m a 60-something man who walks with a walking stick because I have MS. I can’t change the weather, can’t change the fact that I was hungry enough for lunch and currently can’t change my walking difficulty.

I CAN change my reaction to those things. I can have patience and accept them, take my time and just deal with them.

The reason I was just getting to my office at noon was that I had accompanied the love of my life to a doctor appointment during which she and I learned about treatment options for her recently-diagnosed breast cancer.

My gf has effing breast cancer and I’m going to whine because I’m wearing a bulky coat and walk with a limp?!  No.

Patience.

My MS is annoying and I sometimes feel lost as I deal with that and aging. Sometimes I am angry because of limitations due to age and MS. But my MS is nothing compared with most people living with it. It’s just annoying. And everybody ages.

Breast cancer is a serious matter. The good news about hers is that it’s the most easily treatable kind and the designation is ‘stage 0’. In other words, it’s more annoying than anything else and the survival rate is 98%.

She refers to it as a bump in the road.

She and I give each other emotional strength and we found each other at just the right time in our lives. Our regular advice to each other during difficult times is: take deep breaths.

Deep breaths equal patience. Taking a few slow, deep breaths leads to a slowing down of the crazy activity or thoughts that are stressing us at any given moment. A deep breath allows us to stop and think, to regroup momentarily, to consider options for how to react to a situation.

Exercising some patience produces the same results.

I’ll contemplate this a little more before declaring a decision, but at this moment ‘patience’ is the leading contender for my keyword of the year. Patience seems to be a worthy and significant goal for the new year.