Week 7. Patience. Are we rushing ahead too quickly out of lockdown?
"Slow and steady wins the race" comes to mind at the moment as I am observing the effects of starting to ease our lockdown rules. My gut instinct is that it is too soon for England, and we needed to keep pausing alongside Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Could we now be in for a longer journey? As the idiom teaches us, steady and consistent effort can in the long run be more productive than rushing to get somewhere. The latter can prove to be unsustainable, unreliable or could even result in mistakes.
It's natural I guess after nearly two months of lockdown that some of us (plus the economy) are itching to get going again. To help keep steady this week, I'm focusing on the quality of patience. I'm not sure this virtue is fashionable in our modern hyper-connected fast-paced world. But coronavirus is forcing us to remember what patience feels like. During our lockdown, I became re-acquainted with patience while only shopping once each week. If we ran out, we just had to "make do" with a different ingredient. Waiting for certain food products to reappear in the shops for a number of weeks required patience. Being mostly at home for two months, not knowing when we can resume certain aspects of our lives involves ongoing patience.
Patience is a quality I often have in abundance, honed over two decades of teaching children. Anyone home schooling at the moment will know patience, especially when juggling everything else (not an easy task). My last nine years of teaching involved intensively teaching infants literacy, using a form of accelerated learning. And this is where I learned the wisdom that steady really does work. On rare days when I let my drive to rush ahead take over with pressure to achieve "results", their learning would actually slow down. When I stayed present with each child, totally engaged at their pace, we ended up making more progress.
Our health can be another area where patience and a steady pace is required. My back pain is a great teacher at the moment. When I try out certain yoga postures without really paying attention to my body, the pain can flare up for days. This has led back to square one: resting and limited movement. But when I remember to be patient, I take things at a pace that feels good and safe. Paradoxically, I can then do more postures again in the long run.
Of course, I am human and living in this fast moving world. I can easily get caught up rushing ahead on a regular basis. There can be a huge gap between what my "head" wants to do versus my body/health. When my mother suddenly died four years ago, I went to work the following days. I felt such pressure to be at work to set up projects that I over-rode my instinct to stop. And yes, in the end my health forced me to take time off a year later.
We won't know whether easing lockdown in England will have been too soon. Maybe my cautious nature is always going to wait that bit longer. But patience is still going to help us all while we wait for each section of "normal" life to start to unfold. Especially as these parts of our old life aren't quite like they used to be. Endless patience is needed for many of us who are cautious about stepping out much further due to our own mild/moderate health issues. And not to forget our friends and family who are medically "shielding", who will be invited to get to know patience extremely well for many more weeks to come.
Of course, we all want to know when.... when will life be normal again? When can we see our elderly relatives? Book a holiday? And here is another opportunity to practise patience, again!
As Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us:
It's natural I guess after nearly two months of lockdown that some of us (plus the economy) are itching to get going again. To help keep steady this week, I'm focusing on the quality of patience. I'm not sure this virtue is fashionable in our modern hyper-connected fast-paced world. But coronavirus is forcing us to remember what patience feels like. During our lockdown, I became re-acquainted with patience while only shopping once each week. If we ran out, we just had to "make do" with a different ingredient. Waiting for certain food products to reappear in the shops for a number of weeks required patience. Being mostly at home for two months, not knowing when we can resume certain aspects of our lives involves ongoing patience.
Patience is a quality I often have in abundance, honed over two decades of teaching children. Anyone home schooling at the moment will know patience, especially when juggling everything else (not an easy task). My last nine years of teaching involved intensively teaching infants literacy, using a form of accelerated learning. And this is where I learned the wisdom that steady really does work. On rare days when I let my drive to rush ahead take over with pressure to achieve "results", their learning would actually slow down. When I stayed present with each child, totally engaged at their pace, we ended up making more progress.Our health can be another area where patience and a steady pace is required. My back pain is a great teacher at the moment. When I try out certain yoga postures without really paying attention to my body, the pain can flare up for days. This has led back to square one: resting and limited movement. But when I remember to be patient, I take things at a pace that feels good and safe. Paradoxically, I can then do more postures again in the long run.
Of course, I am human and living in this fast moving world. I can easily get caught up rushing ahead on a regular basis. There can be a huge gap between what my "head" wants to do versus my body/health. When my mother suddenly died four years ago, I went to work the following days. I felt such pressure to be at work to set up projects that I over-rode my instinct to stop. And yes, in the end my health forced me to take time off a year later.
We won't know whether easing lockdown in England will have been too soon. Maybe my cautious nature is always going to wait that bit longer. But patience is still going to help us all while we wait for each section of "normal" life to start to unfold. Especially as these parts of our old life aren't quite like they used to be. Endless patience is needed for many of us who are cautious about stepping out much further due to our own mild/moderate health issues. And not to forget our friends and family who are medically "shielding", who will be invited to get to know patience extremely well for many more weeks to come.
Of course, we all want to know when.... when will life be normal again? When can we see our elderly relatives? Book a holiday? And here is another opportunity to practise patience, again!
As Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us:
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