You get what you expect from life, and I just released a podcast on practicing patience with the expectation that I would get ample opportunities to do just that. Less than 24 hours after the launch of the episode, I am getting to practice exactly that which is much easier to talk about than to actually do. I woke up this morning to notification from American Airlines that my noon flight to Salt Lake City, Utah was cancelled today. I am headed to Utah for a mentorship retreat that I have been looking forward to for months, so you can imagine my frustration when Expedia encouraged me by saying that they could get me on a flight to Utah tomorrow morning. After a frustrating hour of pleading on the phone with various telemarketers, I was finally re-booked through a different airline and set to arrive at my destination only thirty minutes later than originally planned.
Be thankful for every opportunity, no matter how frustrating it might be at the time, to practice patience, for patience is a skill that develops in a virtue, and virtues leave legacies.
I arrived to check in at the airport just now only to find that my new airline, Delta, didn’t recognize me or my new confirmation. It took an additional 35 minutes at the “special assistance” desk to work out my paperwork and get my boarding passes, with a woman who refused to smile at me the entire 35 minutes she helped me, but all worked out and I am with tickets in hand.
Open your can of patience today, know that it doesn’t always open up smoothly (like I allowed stress to win over my patience earlier this morning), but if you are persistence, it will open up and you will find it easier and easier to live out. Patience is a skill and we are given opportunities every single day to improve it. With time your skills will become more natural and easier to call upon in times of need and, eventually, it will become an ingrained skill, so natural that it becomes a virtue. Virtues of the things that legacies are built upon; let your patience grow and neither you nor anyone around you will regret it.