Grape #5: Patience Is A Grr Chew

I'm a man of many virtues, but plenty of vices too, and one of my biggest vices is impatience. It's probably why my parents taught me the short verse below.

Patience is a virtue,
possess it if you can,
seldom found in women,
never found in man.

No matter how much of a peace-loving, tree-hugging, happy optimist I am, my short temper has gotten the best of me more often than not. Sometimes mistaken for genuine anger, my temper is almost always just a result of a loss of patience. A coworker or friend taking FOREVER to tell a story, a driver going only 45 miles per hour on the parkway, a Web page taking too long to load, or even just a loved one who isn't the perfect person I want him to be: These are just some of the things that can make me go absolutely CRAZY!!! Grr.

It's so silly really; I mean how will those extra seconds or even minutes hurt me? Not at all! And why should I expect anyone else to be perfect if I couldn't come anywhere near to perfection even if I sought it? Silly.

And so in the pursuit of "virtue", I remind myself to take those "grr" thoughts and "chew" on them a bit more. When they arrive--which they always will--I need to take a deep breath and realize that this is absolutely not worth getting upset over. There are too many real grrs in life for me to overreact so easily to the little ones.

Perpetual patience is not the type of thing we just get. We have to work on it, chew on it, and we'll probably never achieve it anyway. Pursuing virtues like patience is wonderful, but sometimes the pursuing, the reaching itself is the real virtue, the proof that we are at least trying to be better. So when the grr moments inevitably keep showing up, we have to just chew, chew, chew on them, instead of behaving badly in the face of them. 'Cause honey, we're just not pretty when we do that!

Patience is a virtue? Yes. But if you can't totally keep your cool during an extreme, impatiently grr-inducing moment, try chewing on it just a little. Don't grit your teeth too bad now, but keep your big ol' mouth shut and do your best to stay patient! It'll still be hard at times for impatient folks like us, but give it a grr chew, and keep on trying your best! Happy chewing.