Let it be. Because sometimes only time can answer your questions.
Let it be.
Because sometimes only time can answer your questions.
Speaking words of wisdom…..If you pick at a scab too early, it starts to bleed all over the place and you have to wait the same duration for it to heal to the stage that it was previously. You should have left it alone!
Such is life. In so many different ways. Personal. Professional. It doesn’t matter. Sometimes, things have to take their own course. I’ve made no secret about my patience being one of my lesser virtues. Life has shown me that I have an indomitable force of will. I consider that one of my greatest strengths in life. That said, force is sometimes the least valuable attribute when your will is determined to accomplish something incredibly difficult.
A person may be amazing at taking a defined list of variables and bringing them to fruition. A very skilled person will recognize which tool in their arsenal is best served in helping them achieve each one of those line items. For in many cases, it is not the same recipe of strengths and ingredients.
For me, this is one of the greatest benefits of studying aphorisms.
In the course of reading countless examples of exemplary short form philosophy, we are quick to encounter numerous approaches to many different circumstances in life. For example, take the advice of the 16th century Chinese general, Sun Tzu…. Act weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak. I have leveraged this advice in both personal and professional relationships. His advice, which you may find in his book, The Art of War, contains some of the strongest ideas in its vertical. But, that said, there are times when leveraging that advice could be diametrically the wrong decision. In many cases, tact and diplomacy win the day. In others, it boils down to kindness.
If you contrast that advice with something that you learn from another sage, you may well discover that the alternate solution coming from the second sage is considerably more advantageous, and much more likely to succeed.
The value of patience is measured in time. Sometimes, silence is deafening. Have you ever been waiting for an answer or a confirmation and nothing is forthcoming? In those circumstances, silence is a weapon of magnitude. This correlates to both personal and professional circumstances. In that silence, as we are waiting for an outcome, our brains metaphorically explode with the myriad possibilities. It creates chaos and confusion. As Tom Petty would say, “the waiting is the hardest part.“
That said, sometimes we are not desirous of waiting. We want our answer. How many times have you forced an early response that was not what you wanted to hear in either a personal or a professional relationship? After you got the answer you were demanding or requesting, the dissatisfaction with the answer supplants the disappointment that you were encountering previously by not having any answer whatsoever. In moments like that, do you find yourself self exploring and asking how things might have gone if you had just given it ample time to run its natural course? If I had a dollar for every time I have made that mistake, I’m sure I could’ve retired at age 40. That is one of the Achilles’ heels of lack of patience.
When we are focused and determined to succeed at all costs, most certainly one of those costs must be time. It is a hard variable to yield when so much is riding on the choices you’re making. But this does not make it any less important to find that ability to let it be. If anything, it only increases that necessity, because so much rides on your getting the outcome that you are expecting.
One of the most valuable tools that I have employed in the course of taking my short fuse temperament and concealing it at all the right moments is the recognition that people change at different times of the day and in parallel with different circumstances that may or may not be happening in their world. You have to contemplate what frame of reference your encounter is catching the other party in.
To make a rudimentary example, you are more likely to get what you want if that party had a wonderfully romantic evening with their spouse the evening before. Contrast that with asking for the same request on a morning that they just had a very strong argument with their spouse. Learning to read the mindset and frame of reference when you are choosing how to make your requests come to fruition could not be more critical. Often times, the most strategic decisions are held back until such time as the party with whom you are negotiating is in a prime frame of mind to honestly hear your perspective and validate it with genuine understanding and when appropriate, compassion.
Life would be so much easier if we could always say what we mean and mean what we say. But the human specie is so unpredictable, on a person by person basis, as to make every one of us need to understand basic human psychology in order that we might navigate and negotiate in our best capacity.
Paul McCartney said that in a dream, his mother came to him with sound advice and, because he was Paul McCartney, he turned that advice into one of the best sounds in all of life.
Happy Friday!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6T5C-jzSH0
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