January 22, 2010

Patience is a virtue, or so they say. I've been trying to practice patience but in the words of George Bush "it's hard work". I keep plodding along making myself satisfied with what I have (and that's so much more than many) but to be honest there's always a niggling feeling that something is missing. This may be a human condition. I believe that most people have the same feeling and try in many way to fill that gap between happiness and completeness. I guess it comes from the expectation that there is something in the world that will "complete us". But what if that is not so? Maybe that missing feeling is just the way we're constructed. When I think about it that feeling motivates us to search, work, eat, ... Of course our consumer culture doesn't help. It's all about love, satisfaction, and satiation. I once felt that the fear of the future was all about letting go and learning to fly in the fall (just like baby bats do). I suppose that the emptiness or incomplete feeling may be the same. Instead of diagnosing that feeling as a yearning, it might be looked at as a place that the future will have in my life. A space to put those things that will come my way. So is acceptance very different from patience? Acceptance is to yearning as hunger pangs are to dieting. In one case you gain, in the other you lose. It's that damn yin and yang thing again!