Patience / Housekeeping notes

lil pig wrote:

"Honestly...it is difficult being so solitary right now.

i will certainly get past it, and i certainly understand that it is not in my best interest to rush and be hasty...yet that does not take away the difficulty factor.

While i need, crave, and expect to be owned again...at the same time i feel myself terrified of the possibility. And truthfully...i can not give you an exact reason for my fear. i have ideas of why that feeling is there, but truly i am not sure if those ideas are the correct reasons behind the fearfulness.

i find myself skimming my toes on the edge of Dominant waters here and there...then i pull back and think to myself..."no, not yet"...but the thought, ideals, and desire never leave. Eventually, the dipping of a toe will end and i will dive in.

i know how well i serve...not to blow my own horn too much; but really i am a good slave. i devote myself fully, and i work very hard and love being capable and pleasurable property. i am also a smart cookie, who understands the need for my own pro activity, strength, and self sufficientness. Even though i feel a little needy and off balance now...i am not a needy owned slave."


I left her an encouraging comment to the effect that 1) it will happen when it's supposed to, and 2) the waiting is, in and of itself, potentially rewarding.

Waiting is an aspect of all our lives and admittedly it pretty much sucks. It throws us off when we weren't expecting to have to wait. I have a day full of errands planned. I expect the post office to be in and out but end up having to wait; there goes My carefully-thought-out schedule. Or I'm running late for an appointment and every damn light is red. Then when I finally get there the elevator takes forever to come and ends up having to stop at every floor between the lobby and My floor.

While the "trivial" waiting like that can be annoying (and, I realize now, it was often a source of many "unnecessary" cigarettes I smoked), I have the ability to look at the size of the line and come up with an expectation of X number of minutes of waiting time, and in fact coming up with a reasonable expectation is important to making the wait more manageable.

But when there's no way to know how long the wait will be, and when what we are waiting for is something we long for, need, crave, something that speaks to the deepest promptings of our nature, the stakes are so much higher. And it's a waiting that never goes away until it's over. We might not feel it acutely every minute of every day, but it is always there, and the slightest prompt -- one line of a blog, a picture, a sound, a gesture, anything can bring the intensity of our craving crashing back to us.

So, where do I come off saying that such waiting can be almost as rewarding as the (hoped for) end result of the waiting? Am I really saying that standing there watching the timer while the cookies bake can be as much fun as eating the cookies?

If the first part of what I commented to lil pig is correct, i.e., that it will happen when it's supposed to, then the second part, that the waiting itself can be rewarding, more or less has to be true. The difficult part is accepting the first condition.

If one considers that statement "it will happen when it's supposed to happen," and assume for the moment that that is true, there are two basic possible reactions. One, inaction. One does nothing, since the statement implies that our actions can't influence the outcome anyway. Inaction eventually leads to depression and despair, though, as feelings of powerlessness overwhelm our desire to do anything. We end up closed off, isolated. Difficult to be with and ultimately, difficult to love.

The second possible reaction is patience. Patience is not inaction. Patience is a sort of "active waiting," in which we understand that we can not force the action, as it were, because we know that it will happen when it must happen, but at the same time we don't lapse into inaction and despair. A quiet but unshakable certainty informs our actions because we have the knowledge that it will happen and the understanding that the waiting, this interim period, is in and of itself a integral part of the process.

What differentiates one reaction from the other?

Time to haul out one of My favorite chestnuts. The thing that allows for true patience is the ability to let go. If we can let go of the expectation, if we can shed that feeling that our craving and need creates some justification for itself, and at the same time let go of the opposite urge to give up and feel deserving of nothing, we can arrive, eventually, at real patience. We are creatures conditioned to hold on; in our undifferentiated clinging desire we latch onto and jealousy guard the most damaging things, along with the good things. As long as we continue to do that, waiting for what we need the most is going to feel like a never-ending post office line, and that will crush and contort anyone's spirit.

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1. I've added some blogs to the link list and fixed a link or two that had changed. I"m still out scouring, looking for more links to add and beginning the somewhat tedious but ultimately rewarding process of link-whoring.

2. Tomorrow will be two weeks smoke free! I am, slowly, starting to feel like a non-smoker. The other day at work I joked to two smoking co-workers that their "second-hand smoke was killing Me." I promise never to be that kind of non-smoker.

3. As always, KAHTATUS.