Teaching myself patience
Patience is a skill, not a virtue.
I wanted to teach myself to be more patient. I feel like with things being so easily and readily available, patience has been lost or at least has had less of a value to most. Efficiency and convenience have taken over everything so that no one has the patience to learn something, make something, or have something.
So I started making things on my own to improve my patience. It started with making my own coffee. I love my takeaway iced coffee, but I wanted to take my time and make it from bean to cup. But that still felt too easy, so I tried baking, making my own cookies, flans, and lots of other stuff. And then I thought I wanted to try making my own bread, so I did. But making it with commercial yeast felt too easy, so I tried making sourdough, and oh boy, that's when my patience really started to get tested.
Just making a sourdough starter already took a lot of patience and trial and error. It took weeks before I finally nailed it and got a starter that's active, healthy, and alive! But that was just the start. Making the bread took a lot of patience too. It's a lot of trial and error and a lot of failure before I got a perfect loaf. And even after getting a perfect loaf, it doesn't mean that the next batch will be perfect, not by a long shot. Actually, it took a lot of tries before I got another good loaf. Waiting for the bread to rise and proofing takes so long, but you get used to the waiting after a couple of tries. So that really helped me be more patient with the whole process.
But I wanted to do more, so I started growing my own food a couple of months ago. It started with a couple of Basil seeds, and now I have my own balcony garden. I've only been able to get a couple of herb and greens harvest, but it feels so rewarding. And to this day, I'm still training myself to have more patience because a lot of my crops will take 70–90 more days before they start bearing fruits or becoming available for harvest. I also had to deal with lots of challenges that made me almost give up, but I pushed through with them: pests, insects, molds, plant diseases, and self-inflicted issues like improper reporting and other tiny mistakes which really needed me to be more patient to get through with them. I was able to grow plants from cuttings, and I was able to nurse almost dying plants back to life. These are experiences that I can't trade for efficiency and convenience. It's the rewarding feeling that's really making me want to continue with it.
I'm still a work in progress though, Lol I kinda got impatient waiting for a long time to get a harvest, so I tried planting microgrammes, and it still took a couple of days for sure, and there are also a lot of learning and trial and error with the growing media and stuff, but hey, I got a bunch of harvests after 4 weeks of doing that.
What's next? IDK, but I want to do more. I'm thinking maybe consistency in working out. That really needs my patience because I give up every time I don't see or feel results.
What about you?
-A