Patience
Patience is a virtue, but it’s also a skill. This skill can be learned, and the more we practice it, the better we get. Patience is hard to come by nowadays. With attention spans running shorter and shorter every day it’s becoming a valuable commodity.
Not just the type of patience we have at the grocery store when the checkout line is going slow, or when we’re waiting for a friend and they’re running 20 minutes late.
But patience with ourselves and the bigger picture. This is a more difficult kind of patience...it’s long-term patience. You don’t just have to be patient for 5 minutes, but maybe for 5 years.
Long-term patience requires that we have an acceptance of where we are now, while still remembering where we want to go in the future.
Set Goals, But Be Patient When Things Go Wrong
Goals are super important. They help keep you on track and steer you in the direction of where you want to go. But sometimes goals have to change, and sometimes you want them to change.
Andy has pretty much always known where he wanted to go in life; what college, what major, where he wanted to live. I’m a little more of a “free spirit” as some would say, but I still knew I would go to UVM and that I wanted to make a lot of money.
Even as kids ‘dating’ in middle school, we both assumed we knew what our life would look like: two jobs, a house, kids. Very normal life goals. But by the time we were halfway through high school, it had become clear that things were changing. I was sick. My plans, and therefore our plans, were changing.
By junior year, something in my gut told me kids were not going to be in the cards. As it turns out, they’re not. By senior year I had a blood clot and 2 diagnoses, chronic migraines and antiphospholipid syndrome. By the time I started college I had a third diagnosis, lupus.
University plans had turned into community college, and an ‘undecided’ major is where I started, unsure of what career I would actually be able (and want) to do. After changing my major several times and then dropping out of UVM because I couldn’t keep up with it, I decided nursing school at Vermont Tech and an associate’s degree was the answer. It wasn’t.
I was able to finish the program and worked for one year as a nurse, but it took a huge toll on my health. At this point, we decided the second full-time income wasn’t worth it
Our life looks nothing like what we planned or had dreamed of in middle school, or even in college. But in a lot of ways, it’s better. We spend so much more time together than we ever could have imagined, and live a much healthier, happier lifestyle than we did when we both were working.
Look for the silver lining when things go wrong.
Don’t Burn Yourself Out
You have to work hard to achieve your goals. And the harder you work, the faster you’ll get there. But you need to have some balance too. You can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor if your labor drives you insane.
When we decided we wanted to build a house, we invested every ounce of energy, every spare moment, and every dollar we had into making that goal a reality. And it required a great deal of patience. It took years from the time we decided we wanted to start building to the day we moved in.
And our house STILL isn’t finished!
We lived with family to save money and every penny we had went towards the house. We didn’t go out, buy new clothes, or spend on anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. The vast majority of both of our incomes (I was working at the time) went towards the house. We cut hobbies, simplified our meal planning, and Andy worked a second job to save for this massive project.
Once we started building, we worked on it every day after work, and every day on the weekends whether we wanted to or not. Even if I was too sick to go, Andy still worked on it by himself often rolling in well past bedtime.
This level of dedication got our house built, but it burned us out. We were mentally and physically spent by the time we moved in.
We don’t approach all of our goals like this because it would be unreasonable and unsustainable. Though it helps us reach our dreams it certainly takes a toll on our bodies both physically and mentally.
Plan to Be In It For the Long Haul
I can do just about anything for a day or even a week. I think most people can. I can spend a week painting the house if I have a week off to recover afterward. But I could never make a career out of painting houses.
For years this phenomenon tricked me into taking jobs that I just wasn’t cut out for. After I quit working as a nurse, I worked part-time in various jobs, looking for something that ‘fit’ and didn’t leave me exhausted, and headed to bed as soon as I got home.
I took a break and then found a 30 hr a week job with much less stress, but it often had late nights. I cleaned houses, I worked retail, and a variety of other things, working as few as 15 hours a week, but even that left me exhausted. I never had quite enough time to recover each weekend, and in the end, I never lasted at a job more than a year. Then I would quit, and rest for at least 6 months before contemplating getting another job, and the cycle would repeat.
We invest a lot of ourselves and our self-worth into our jobs and feel like a failure when it doesn’t work out. I took jobs that weren’t right and made me sick because I felt like I needed to. I needed the money and I needed to look and feel like I was contributing something of worth.
What I needed to do, was learn to be patient. We are incredibly fortunate and privileged that we can make one income work for us. By the time we paid for the increased doctor’s visits, food costs (because I wasn’t cooking), a second car, clothes, and all of the other expenses that come with working, it didn’t even make sense for me to be working 15 hours a week. I was barely making anything and just working because I “should”.
Now, I’ve given up on working a normal job. Instead, we’re creating our own income by building our own business. It’s going to take a long time, and there will be many failures (there already have been). But we’re investing my limited energy into our own business, where I can have the flexible schedule I need and we can do something we enjoy that aligns with our beliefs and values.
Don’t Wish Your Life Away
Anything meaningful you want to do in life is going to take time. Probably MUCH, MUCH MORE TIME than you think it will.
So be patient and don’t rush through it. We all want to get to the end goal; the successful business, or the fit body, or whatever the prize is. But we don’t want to miss the journey along the way, because that’s 99% of life.
And if you do end up reaching your goal, I can guarantee you your life will not be the magical fairytale you thought it would be. You will have thought of another goal, the finish line will move, and you will keep chasing that magical perfect ending for the rest of your life. So learn to enjoy the messy middle that makes up our lives instead of living for the finish line.
We don’t regret putting the effort we did into the house project at all, but we are so glad we wrapped it up when we did. We had many motivations to get us into our own place as you’d expect if you were a college graduate and back at home, co-living with multiple family members (we love our family, but it was a very, very full house for a couple of years).
And no, the house did not make our lives complete. We still want things, and we’ve made new goals (we want to build a business, and get livestock, etc). So just enjoy where you are now.
Honestly, the toll that this project took on our lives caused us to take almost two years “off” to coast, rest, and recharge. This period of rest let us take a breath, reassess, and learn what it’s like to live our own life. Rather than just running headfirst into the next project and dream ahead of us, we’re going at a slower pace and enjoying all the experiences we can.
Remember- life doesn’t ‘start’ when you reach your goal. Life started many years ago. You’re living it now; so don’t miss out! Start making little tiny improvements every day that make your life into what you want it to be, and be patient. If you are making progress towards your goals every day, you will get there, even if it looks different than what you had imagined at the beginning. It will probably be much better than what you imagined.
