Posts Tagged ‘patience’
Freezing Wet
You know what is worse than freezing cold? Freezing wet. It is one condition for which we would never question whether or not to move the horses indoors. Our horses do a pretty good job of enduring exposure to snow and cold, but when it comes to rain at freezing temperatures, they need shelter.
Regardless the pleasure of early warmth we enjoyed throughout much of the month of March, the trend recently has shifted significantly away from pleasant.
It has us burning fires in the fireplace and cuddling up under blankets, drinking hot drinks.
I suppose there is a lesson for us somewhere in this situation about patience, but I don’t really need to be tempted by early warmth to get the lesson about being patient for the spring growing season to truly arrive. I’m sure I could learn it just as well with winter staying winter the whole time, and lasting well into April.
If I had any sense I’d be using this time to change the oil in the lawn tractor and finish preparing it for the long mowing season that lies ahead. The cold and wet may be lingering, but logic dictates it will eventually end.
When it does, growing things definitely won’t hesitate to respond.
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Waiting Games
My patience has been tested the last few weeks, waiting for three different contractors to make appearances on our property. Unfortunately, nature isn’t going to delay the onset of winter just because my projects weren’t completed. Completed seems like a humorous concept, since I can’t even get people here to start. They all claim the reason they can’t make it is that they are too busy and behind schedule.
Yesterday, I received a token visit from landscapers who will put in drain tile to route water around the paddocks, in hopes of keeping them from becoming such mud pits. It was “landscapers” plural, because the first one was so over-busy through the end of the year he needed to contract it out to a friend. They took some final measurements and said work should be able to start next week. I can only hope.
It felt a bit like the experience I often have in a visit to the doctor. I check in to let them know I arrived at the time of my appointment, and take my place in the waiting area. After what seems like way too long to be waiting, I start getting agitated. When that feeling starts to morph into anger, a nurse pops out and calls my name.
That resets my angst, and I am happy my turn has finally arrived. Except, it hasn’t. I eventually discover that all they have done is move me from the outer waiting area to an exam room to continue waiting. It’s a great system, because I tolerate a lot more waiting when it is broken up by little moments of faux progress. It would have been an intolerable wait, had I spent the entire time in the outer chairs. Broken into two stages —the second one feeling like actual progress— helped me accept the overall total wait-time without making a fuss.
It feels like the landscape contractors finally made an appearance yesterday to reset my angst and make me feel good about them telling me the work should be able to start next week sometime.
Once again, it works wonders for me. My previous anxieties have been reset. I’m happy with their latest promise.
Here’s hoping they are able to live up to it.
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Patience Practice
Slept in today, on the first day of September. Nine hours of slumber last night! Woo hoo! Even though I didn’t accomplish everything I would have loved to yesterday, what I did do, wore me out. By the end of the day, Cyndie gave up on her idea of going up to the lake, too, so I guess we were both beat.
I spent more time than was productive for me, just watching the guys working on the hay shed, and even that seemed to contribute to making me feel exhausted. Unfortunately, their progress was much slower than I anticipated, and I think slower than they hoped. By the end of the long day, the only sheet metal attached to the frame was across the front of the roof.
Cyndie worked the ground in one of the paddocks to level it out, pulling out weeds and raking up dead grass, whenever she wasn’t helping hold boards for me. I was framing and hanging boards on the wall of our barn under the overhang, to protect the steel siding from horse activity. We continue to upgrade the infrastructure from what had been set up for mini horses, to become a full-size equine facility.
It’s all good, just not as much progress as we’d hoped.
What can we do but be patient? We are discovering opportunities to practice patience over, and over, again. The process of refining our patience will serve us well when we finally are caring for horses here. So, even before they arrive, we are learning from our horses, through the process of getting prepared for them.
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