Patience

While working in the garage a couple of days ago, I was visiting with my oldest daughter.  She asked me how I have so much patience.  I've been told most of my life that I am and would be a patient man, but I don't guess I've ever really thought much about it  I've always just shrugged and said I guess so.  Leave it to the voice of a child (albeit nearly an adult child) to actually make me consider.  I told her that it took experience, but not just any type, it takes a certain type of hard experience.  We kinda discussed patience and her lack of it, and how she thinks she inherited that trait from her momma.  The conversation then took the path of any conversation held between two individuals who have ADD, and other subjects came up and she ran off to work on I'm not sure what and I continued on the wiring.  Now the point behind this long winded typical Jeremy tale isn't that I enjoyed chatting with her, which I do, but is instead that I believe I did her a disservice.  There is so much more to my patience than just experiences learned the hard way.  There are many types of people in the world, about 4.5 billion different types.  Everyone with varying levels of various attributes.  In regards to this attribute, patience, some are born with immense amounts of patience some maybe not so much.  That patience changes with time however, and with experience.  But most importantly with love, nothing compares with the patience you develop with people you care about.  It adds to what patience you naturally have.  It allows your world to be fulfilled in a way you never could expect as you watch those you love learn to spread their wings, no matter their age.  It takes patience to love with all that you have, Christie may be impatient to an extent, but with me she has the patience of a stone, and believe me it takes patience to deal with me.  You must have patience when you watch your children learn on their own, through their own experiences, because in the end those lessons are the best.  You must have patience when the person you love is having a bad day, because having patience and love is the only way to brighten their day.  You must have patience to spread your own wings and fly, and that kind of patience can only be learned by loving yourself and those that are most important to you.  Not just hard mistakes.  So there you are Penelope, the reason I am so patient is that it comes naturally and that I love, not only your mother but all of my daughters, and I have learned, not just the hard way but the happy way as well.

-Jeremy