Patience, Why Patience?

Patience, why Patience?

Because without patience we are children who are given everything and taught nothing.

In The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, The Doctor’s Opinion, it says, “The problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve.” I read this with a small group of men I meet with once a week who have become instrumental in my sobriety and change.

During meditation I thought about this statement and how it applies to my situation. The last several years of drinking my problems definitely piled up. Problems in owning a business, jobs after selling a business and returning to the workforce as an employee, general relationships, intimate relationships, my home, my possessions, my thought processes, my body and general health, my relationship with God. I could go on but quite frankly everyone in this situation gets the point and I don’t have to keep listing the problems an alcoholic/addict piles up.

In meditation I thought about a tangled ball with hundreds of pieces of yarn or string. Many of them were long and intertwined through the entire ball. Wrapping around literally every single other piece and themselves so many times that some of the small lengths were almost completely lost under the wrappings of the longer ones. The short ones were perplexing. Such small things could be plucked right out with no effort, right? You could just pull and they would slip out easily. However, on looking deeper and attempting a few, that was not the case because of the long ones wrapped around them, choking them and holding them in place. Most of them could not be simply pulled out.

There were medium lengths in the tangled ball. Those were easy to distinguish and gave hope that parts of this would be more simple than others and some success could be found early. Most of the medium lengths were somewhat clear and easy to see and follow the trail intertwined within.

The long ones were menacing. They spoke to me with voices so sinister and evil my soul shook with deep trembling and my confidence from the last weeks and months of sobriety melted like an ice cube on the hood of a car in the Arizona desert.

In my meditation I wanted it to be done. I saw those problems that had piled up and wound up into that ball and I wanted them dealt with. I wanted to be free of that tangled mess. I wanted to close my eyes at night and not see all those terrible things. But I couldn’t and it frustrated me. People speak about “sustained sobriety” being at 1 year. I wanted to be there. I’m ready to be there! I’m done with drinking dammit! I’m done and I will never go back so let me just be at sustained sobriety and have all my pieces of string unwound and I’ll be happy and content and a “New Man”.

One of the men at the group responded to my impatience with his own experiences. He said he too wanted to be there. 1 year, 5 years, 10 years and more like all the other “old timers” in AA. But as hard as it was he needed to experience that journey. If he hadn’t experienced the journey he would have just gone back to the bottle. If he hadn’t experienced all that pain and struggle he never would have learned the lessons he needed and experienced the triumph of victory.

My grandmother loved to fly kites and one time at the coast her string got terribly tangled. I spent literally hours untangling it with such ferocious determination my family became invested in the outcome as well. When I finally pulled that last tangle out, with tingling fingertips from the work, I shouted in elation and success. I had done it! I had done the work, made the effort, learned how all the tangles interacted with each other that created the disaster, solved that disaster and been successful. Raw and painful fingertips reminded me of my determination and of my success.

What is the point of closing my eyes with a ball of tangled problems in my life and opening my eyes to that ball just not being there anymore? There’s no elation of that last tangle being removed. There’s no reminder of my commitment and dedication. No one around me will see the hard work and be inspired and helped through it. I would have no lessons learned, no growth experienced, and no maturity and stories to pass on to those who will walk this same path and journey after me.

Patience, why patience? Because without patience we are children who are given everything and taught nothing.

And with that, I will take another 24