Patience

You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not look now for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I should say that to myself every day, in reassurance. (Some of) my questions are these:

• Will I make it through grad school?
• Am I a good librarian?
• How will I ever do all of this?
• Am I psychotic?
• When can I take a break?

My life is very full right now, and very busy. I work 40 hours each week, including some evenings and weekends. I have two 3-hour classes each week. Then there is the homework: reading, researching, writing. Altogether, it is a lot.

The quantity of my work and homework leads me sometimes into impatience. But the quality of both tasks actually requires patience. Answering questions, helping patrons and teaching computer skills at the library, I must slow down and explain each step, without sounding or appearing impatient. That itself requires skill. I do not always succeed.

My classes require patience, because 3 hours of any one subject can become tedious. Especially at the end of a workday. Researching and writing, not to mention reading seemingly redundant articles, requires yet more patience.

And this is only my first semester. I must be patient with myself, patient with time, trusting that I will make it through. Even though the weeks go much faster now, a year and nine months seems a long way off.

I also require patience of those in my life. I am lately more lax at keeping in touch with family and friends. Wes sometimes is my only stress outlet. He is usually very patient, unless he's hungry. I understand that. Most of my study breaks include food: buying it, preparing it, eating it, washing dishes afterward. I have actually been using housework as a reason to postpone homework.

But tomorrow I plan to take a break. The library is closed for Veterans Day and I have no pressing homework (no more pressing than usual). So I plan to go hiking, while it is dry and warmish. After our mid-October snow and frigid temperatures, November has been lovely. (And you thought I might not discuss the weather for once. Hah.) It has not rained or snowed in 11 days. Of course, this weekend that might all change. Winter in Wyoming is another good reason for patience.

Comments

[Mums]

And you called your 'rents! We're truly appreciative we could share part of your day off. love, mom

[Leah]

I love this post. I've been revisiting this and reminding myself to be patient as well. How is it that our lives so frequently mirror each other? I'm sure there's a poem in there somewhere about the obverse and reverse and reflection and . . . whatever the opposite of reflection is. When lives bend and bow and move toward and away from each other. We're both different, yet somehow we are following a path that looks strangely similar at times.

[Wes]

Patience is good, especially when Wes is hungry, when he's an ill-tempered, snappish fiend only placated by lobbing chunks of half-cooked meat at him. The rest of the time, when he's well fed, he's all for this grad school thing.
Keep going. You got it. Don't let up. Keep getting A's.
Keep kicking grad school's ass.