Patience

At first I wasn't sure if I had anything to write about today. Then I realized that I did: patience. I'm not a very patient person by nature. But I seem to be doing a lot of waiting lately. Mind you, I've been keeping myself very busy with lots of other things, but there are a number of things I've just had to wait on. Its a balancing act for me, between the waiting and the keeping busy. I don't want to be focused so much on waiting for things in the future that I miss out on the present, but I also don't want to be focused so much on the present that I miss out on opportunities to get to the things in the future I'm waiting for.

I've kind of solved the problem a bit by making sure I make long term plans for where I want to be in 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, and 6 months, and by making sure every six months or less I review those plans. And by setting yearly goals and monthly goals that seem right at the time yet also correspond to my long term plans. I've been working the past couple months to improve how I translate my monthly goals to weekly goals so that, with my busy schedule, I still manage to get done what I want and need to get done weekly to make those monthly goals.

I bring up my goals because I've found that when there is something I could fall into the impatient trap about, it helps me to see it out in the future on my goals list, or on my long term plans list. For example our rental house. We've been trying to sell it off and on for almost 3 years. Now we've accepted an offer and are waiting for it to close. We've been here before. A part of me wants to jump forward in time to the end of April to get to the place where we either have all that mortgage & sale stuff done and set, or know that it fell through. But I know that by jumping forward, or only focusing on that place in the future, I would miss out on all sorts of things in the next month and a half.

So I make sure 'selling the rental house' is on my plan & goal lists. Good, there it is. On my long term plan list it's under my 6 month plans, so we're doing good there. Its also under my financial goals section of my 2012 goals, so we're doing good there too. On my monthly goals, which we set before we had the increased interest in the house, I didn't even have 'accept an offer on the rental house', so we're doing great there. I likely should add something to my monthly list along the lines of 'keep the house sale moving along to closing', which would remind me to put items on my weekly list such as 'submit the report from the home inspection fixes we did last fall' (which actually is currently on my weekly list).

If I was just doing items that related to the sale of the rental, then I would worry that I was missing the here and now, and just focusing on the future and struggling with my impatience. But since I know from looking at my weekly goals list that I've got several non-sale related items on there, and since I know my days are filled with non-sale related items too, I can remember to relax a bit and know that I'm managing to wait without just sitting around being impatient :) I know in my heart that the good things in life come from letting go and letting things happen as they will, but sometimes in my head I have to do a bit of fighting with feelings of impatience and eagerness before I get to that calm state where I let go and see what comes, while still making sure things get done as they need to, to allow good things to come. My to do lists help me with that :)