Sometimes Monday afternoon feels like it should be Friday night. Thursday at least.
Everything is over-scheduled. The calendar looks like a game of Tetris played by an anxious god: ferry runs, presentations, meetings, and the occasional spiritual ambush disguised as a “networking dinner.” You think the bottleneck is out there — in the logistics, the software, the missing link in your grand plan.
But then you notice your own shoulders trying to fuse with your ears, and you realize: oh. I’m the bottleneck.
That’s the first myth worth composting. We talk about bottlenecks like they’re mechanical — something you can fix with a process map or a better CRM. But most of the time, it’s just breath withheld. It’s the small animal inside us bracing for the next demand.
Patience isn’t passive. It’s a kind of active surrender — not the flop of giving up, but the grounded choice to wait without tightening. To hold the line gently. The trick is remembering that “holding space” isn’t the same as “holding your breath.”
Take last weekend’s community event. A panel on courageous conversations in a polarized world. Half the island thought it would be a bloodbath. Online forums were apparently aflame, though I was blissfully unaware — and better for it.
Then the guy everyone feared — the supposed antagonist, an evangelical with his own bruises — opened the session with a prayer. It wasn’t performative, and it wasn’t trying to convert anybody. His voice quavered. It was the sound of a man trying to find words for something he could feel but not name. In that moment, you could feel the charge drain from the room. Everyone exhaled, almost involuntarily. We remembered that underneath all the posturing and theory, we’re just awkward mammals trying to name the sacred.
That’s what patience looks like in real time: the long inhale before deciding someone’s your enemy; the pause that keeps the fire from catching.
Maturation, I’ve come to think, is the slow unlearning of our purity tests. You spend decades hating a thing, only to find some of it living quietly inside you. Integration isn’t tidy. It’s a muddy handshake between the parts of ourselves we swore we’d never invite in.
And when you stop fighting that truth, the world starts reading differently — like a mirror written in reverse. The villains become messengers. The interruptions become thresholds. The bottlenecks turn out to be breath.
So, here’s the working note for the week:
If you think you’re stuck, check your lungs before your to-do list.
If the system’s jammed, try lowering your shoulders.
Because patience — real patience — is not standing still. It’s choosing to stay in motion without losing your humanity.
Closing Koan
What if the blockage was never between you and the world—
but between your in-breath and your out-breath?
When patience finally exhales,
what else starts to move?
[Editor’s note: this piece was written several Mondays ago, but see the aforementioned Tetris calendar… and apologies for the delay.]