It is extremely difficult to accept that aging involves the reality that one’s life does not run in accordance with the plan envisaged. The point is that when one is young, they have this feeling of everything being in its proper place. They go through education, find a career, accomplish something, make contacts, become successful, and achieve their goals at last. It should be noted that one may not know exactly when all this is going to take place, but there is an understanding of how life should develop.
Then life actually happens. Someone you thought would stay leaves. A plan you spent years preparing for doesn't work. Someone else gets the opportunity you wanted. You see others around you progress through various phases of life as you try to figure out what it all means for your own life. This is when patience becomes more than mere impatience. Why haven't I figured this out? Why does everyone else seem to be moving forward? Why am I taking so long?
Someone gets married before you. Someone builds a career before you. Someone buys a house. Someone travels. Someone starts a business. Someone seems to have figured themselves out while you're still changing your mind about what you want. And suddenly, their progress becomes evidence against your own.
You know every hesitation. Every failure and every opportunity you missed.
You're comparing your entire story to someone else's visible chapter.
And sometimes, you're not even comparing yourself to another person. You're comparing yourself to you.
The person you thought you'd become by now. That's a particularly difficult comparison because you can't simply look away from it. You remember the plans you had. You remember the confidence you once carried. You remember thinking that by this age you'd have certain things figured out.
Maybe you thought you'd be further ahead. Maybe you thought you'd be happier. Maybe you thought certain people would still be beside you. Maybe you thought you'd have become someone completely different. Now, here you stand, observing the gap between who you thought you would become and who you really are. It can certainly be hard not to view this gap as failure.
Yet; a late life does not automatically equate to a life set up for failure.
Some things just simply take longer than you anticipated. And this is an annoying reality, seeing how patience is always portrayed as if it brings peace of mind. Not always.
Patience is sometimes very painful.
This means that you continue working without seeing any sign of any progress. Patience is seeing someone else getting what you have been eagerly waiting for all these years without letting their pace of doing things become an insult to your own. Patience means waking up on yet another average day and doing whatever you can, although you had already expected to be somewhere else by now. This is not exciting. There is no dramatic music in the background.
Sometimes, patience means repeating the same old process. And again. Perhaps that's why it requires strength.
It's easy to be patient when you know exactly when your patience will be rewarded.
Tell someone to wait six months and they'll probably manage. Tell them to wait indefinitely, and suddenly waiting becomes much harder.
Because now there is no guarantee. You don't know whether the opportunity is coming. You don't know whether the relationship will work. You don't know whether the years of effort will eventually produce what you imagined. You merely understand that rushing into something because of fear of being too late may lead to another type of regret.
Or, do you accept that not everything can be rushed without being ruined? You cannot rush into being emotionally ready just because you think you were late. You cannot hurry your career along because other people in your social circle got ahead of you. And perhaps we need to become more comfortable with that. Not passive. Not lazy. Not sitting around waiting for life to rescue us. Patient.
There is a distinction. Patience does not mean that you give up. Patience means that you no longer expect every action to bear fruit immediately. You continue changing what isn't working, and you continue moving. But you stop looking at every quiet period as proof that you're going nowhere. Because sometimes something is happening beneath the surface.
A person can spend years becoming capable of something before anyone notices. And perhaps people are not so different. You could be becoming someone stronger, smarter, calmer, better-equipped but you wouldn't have achieved anything remarkable about it yet.
It's hard to understand this when you’re in the midst of it. We usually realize our development later on. You look back at yourself and you see that something which would have crushed you five years ago barely fazed you now.
You know you cope with disappointments differently now. You no longer chase after people who are running away from you. You no longer need everybody's validation. You no longer jump to conclusions every time you run into a problem. You know what you value right now. You wouldn’t have been aware of any of this when it was happening because sometimes, growth can be really boring. But it feels like becoming slightly less lost. And perhaps that's enough. So why should you punish yourself for it?
Your life may be taking more time than you ever thought possible. Maybe mine is too, but I don’t think that's a tragedy. Some stories simply need more pages than we thought they would, and learning to accept that, is a wonderful thing.
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