 Hello, it's Bridget. Welcome to Sunday Morning Coffee with Bridget. Today's topic is waiting and patience. Two of your very favorite subjects, I'm sure. Okay, okay, I know, I know. Seriously now, let's talk about this. Let's have this conversation. Don't you feel like the idea of patience is this non-existent experience in your life? Really, isn't that really what's missing after all? Aren't you just missing patience? If you could have patience, wouldn't everything just be so much better? You know, I think that's a fallacy. I think that is something that is really not true. I think patience as a virtue, we've been touted and taught that the people who are so great and wonderful and graceful, they're so patient. Well, what is really patience? What is that? Let's define that. Patience truly has been put upon this pedestal where it is in alignment with perfection. That's right, patience and perfection. Same plane, okay? Oh my goodness, patience and perfection. So, perfection is not attainable. And I'm here to say, I believe that it might be possible that patience isn't either. Ooh, gasp. Okay, so here's why I feel this way. Patience is something that is elusive. It's ambiguous. It's experiential. It comes in fleeting moments where opportunity lines up, where we can actually be present. What we really crave, seek, want and admire what we call patience is actually a desire for presence, for being present to the moment, for being aware and awake in the moment. That's it. And if that's what it is, we always have the opportunity to have that. Now, where does waiting come in? Well, this concept of waiting is something that we have often in our lives, don't we? We are waiting in the waiting room at the dental office. We are waiting in line at the grocery store. We are waiting in traffic. We are waiting at the stop signal. We are waiting for someone else to send us those documents to sign. We are waiting for our kids to be old enough to make their own dinner for crying out loud and do their own laundry. We are waiting all the time. We are always waiting. Waiting is an opportunity that we are gifted over and over and over again. And let me tell you, if we could believe that waiting is a little particle of patience, which the point of patience is to actually be present and experience life as it's unfolding, maybe this waiting thing is not so bad. Don't you feel like waiting is often a waste of your time, like you're just killing time? Oh, I hate that expression. As I say it right now, my soul just goes, oh, yuck. What if we could shift our perspective and our mind's view about waiting, the concept of waiting? What happens when we're waiting for a delivery or a rush is we feel impatient. Inpatients, right? We're not patients. We're not in a state of patience. We're impatient. I am patient. I am not patient, which we know is like perfection and not attainable, but we're so aware of how imperfect we are and how inadequate we are at this achievement of this virtue of patience that we feel even worse about ourselves, why we are waiting, and because we are feeling like total crap and that we are just not good enough to attain this graceful patience that we perceive in other people, which isn't actually reality, by the way, it's only our own perception and filters. And yet in our own space, we are just hurry, hurry, rush, rush, feel like crap, and we're trying to run our inadequacies, our feelings of not being enough, not being smart enough, good enough, on time enough, not being in the right relationships, not teaching our kids right so that we were able to get out of the house on time so we weren't late to that dental appointment and now backlogged, and you know what I'm saying, right? It's just this kind of one thing leads to another thing, leads to another thing, and we can go down this road and create this momentum of angst, of difficulty, of challenge, of struggle when we don't need to. We don't need that. Challenge and struggle serves a purpose and it's something that can be meaningful in the experience, but challenge and struggle for challenge and struggle's sake, that's just drama. That's us whining and complaining energetically about how much we feel not enough. And we're using this time of waiting, this beautiful gift of space between what I was doing and what I need to be doing or what's next between what I was doing and what I'm doing next. There's this place in between which is being and waiting provides the opportunity to be with ourselves and we don't like that. Even if you're waiting with other people, they can entertain you sure and distract you for a while, but eventually you're going to have to be with yourself. You're going to have to wait by yourself and why are you so uncomfortable with that? Why are you so uncomfortable with that? Interesting. You don't like being with yourself. The by yourself is not, I'm not talking about being alone. That's different. That's a different conversation. I'm talking about being by yourself. That means your thoughts are going to be dominant. Your thoughts. And are those thoughts the voices of all the patterns and bad experiences you've had in the past that have told you who you are, given you identities that maybe weren't in alignment with what you were born into life with and created this eternal conversation of conflict that comes out in these times when you're waiting, when you're by yourself, you're with your own thoughts. Maybe that's why we're always in such a hurry and rushing and moving, trying to prove our value and worthiness, trying to outrun those voices, messages in our mind. I do think that is true. I do. I've been really contemplating some of these deeper concepts lately and trying to recognize in my own life where I'm wasting, wasting my energy, leaking my energy, leaking my time. Time is so precious. I have two. Let me just share with you this. I have two 96-year-old grandmothers. Mm-hmm. Grandfathers long gone. But the men, the women in my family, 96. That would mean I am halfway through my life right now. That's it. I'm like, whoa. I'm at the halfway point. Oh, my goodness. This time that I have right here, right now, now, in contrast to this two grandmothers that are 96, I also have this perspective of I have a child that's graduating this year, my second one out of the graduation experience, by the way. I've had a graduation experience not last year, but the year before. And with current state of affairs and events and viruses and such, it's a different kind of graduation experience for him. And he's been really working with disappointment, and I've been really with him waiting one decision to the next decision to the next decision. And the wait has created a opportunity. Wow, I feel emotions right now. An opportunity of a gift for me to be with him at that age of 18, you know. Be with him and help navigate the disappointments, the different vision of what this moment in his life would be like. He's very sentimental, and so many idealistic visioning images of walking across that stage and all of his family being there and having a big party, which we're not going to do and all this stuff, and turns out only two people. At this point, there's two people that get to go and see him graduate. And it's outside on a huge football field and I'm ecstatic about that. And I told him when he got that email as we were waiting to find out what was going to happen at graduation. He got that email and I was excited for him. I said, brought this perspective, this energy in of, oh my gosh, this is great, this is awesome. I get to see you graduate. Your dad and I will both be there and it's going to be awesome. I'm so happy for you that you get to be on that field and you get to be with your classmates and you get to have that graduation experience. If I can't physically be there, oh, mama's got a good view and spirit. And I'm sure they'll broadcast it and stuff. I'm like, I'm always there because I'm like, I'm always with you. You're a part of me. You're a part of me. And that waiting process was heart wrenching and yet it helped us together navigate how life does present you with disappointments and things don't turn out the best way even when you're patiently waiting perfection trying to be in perfection by patiently waiting because if you're patient, then you're virtuous and that means good things happen to you. Well, that's not always how it works, right? You can be the best person in the world that has something really crappy and horrific happen to you, right? It doesn't speak to your value but this concept of time connected to this waiting making the most of the time that we have is not just lip service people it's not just stuff for life coaches and end-of-life conversations. This is the time we have now. You get to make it count do what matters to you, be with who matters to you, think thoughts when you are by yourself and you're waiting that are going to encourage you and inspire you. It's not about what you do it's how you are being when you are waiting. That's your true self and if you don't like that it's because there's old patterns and old voices that have been derailing you and it's time for you to get your power back and let some of those old things just let them go and by let them go, I mean make some choices that when you are by yourself and you are with your thoughts and you are in the waiting times that you're going to make the most of this time you're going to listen to great music you're going to stare out the window and watch the fluffy clouds form in funny shapes like when you know you're a kid you're going to appreciate the person that you're with even if you're mad at them right now or even if they're doing stupid things you're going to appreciate because you're going to be in a space where you really see the good you really feel the good because that's what you are at your core you are good you are so good so so good this is a powerful time for you and it's not about what you do it's not about the outside actions it's about what you're thinking what you're feeling it's about you being wow that's a we just landed that plane wow that's a big one you guys hey that was a big one I hope that this inspires your spirit it fills you with some hope this is your life after all please remember that it's yours and it's up to you simply live this is Bridget, thank you so much for listening to Sunday Morning Coffee a podcast that is posted and shared on above life channel on YouTube if you're looking for more inspiration check me out on fairy grasshopper my YouTube channel for the magical student where I share all things about my psychic and intuitive life you can find me on social media as Bridget inspired on Facebook or Bridget inspired on Instagram thanks for being here