Patience is a Virtue

When I left work after 4:30 on Thursday, I was completely spent.  I had a full day at the college and was ready to go home, greet my hubby, and then meet our daughter Kristen in Putnam for dinner.

There was a huge construction project on Route 101- they were chopping up the road to resurface as far as the eye could see.  Traffic was one lane only and my side had been stopped, but all I could see was a long stretch of lane with the other filled with trucks, bobcats, and equipment.  It was at least ten minutes (maybe five but it felt like ten)  before I could see cars coming down the lane in the other direction.  It took another few minutes for those vehicles (I counted 28) to pass us and for our line to begin moving along.

I was the second car in line.  As the cars piled up behind me, I began to feel impatient. I began to think, "What the heck are these workers doing still here at a time when people are trying to get home from work?".  Then I looked behind.  Some people were beginning to do three point turns to go back and find another route.  Others were poking their heads out of the windows, or making gestures.   I guess that as a society we are very impatient people. When we get impatient, we want to turn around and find an easier way because "waiting" is hard.  As annoyed as I was, I just sat and waited!!

How does this relate to the Follow the Fifty Journey?  Well, I believe that one of our worst enemies is impatience.  We want to get healthy; we want to lose weight; we want our blood pressure to go down, or our blood sugars to be normal, ect..  We start off like I did when I left the college on Thurday afternoon - ready to get to our destinations and relax.  The last thing we want is to be stopped in traffic, or have and obstacle put in our way!  We have to learn to be patient.  Our bad health habits did not happen overnight, and they won't go away any quicker.  It is a process.  We have to wait out the bad parts, be persistent, and then continue on our way.

Those people who decided to turn around and not wait out the traffic line probably took longer to get to their destination than if they had sat out the time in line.  They may have decided not to go to the destination that they intended and sought out a different place.  We do this to ourselves all the time.  We turn around and look for something easier.  We backtrack.  We lose patience.

I hope that my FTF sisters can keep in line, heading for their destinations, and be patient when they hit "constuction", so that we will all arrive at our goal in December together!