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Sowing Patience

 


I think we sometimes confuse passivity with patience. A patient farmer does not stare at his field each morning from a rocking chair, sipping sweet tea as he waits for his crops to grow. That has nothing to do with patience. It is simply being passive, if not just plain lazy.

No, the patient farmer gets up early and works the field. He tills the ground, breaking up the hard soil to prepare the field to produce fruit in the future. He plants seeds of opportunity. He waters and fertilizes, ensuring those seeds have the resources and nourishment necessary to flourish. He tirelessly tracks down and eliminates the weeds in the soil that might steal resources from his seeds and choke out their opportunity.

Patience is not merely a state of mind, it is a way of living. It is not inaction, but rather, it is the execution of deliberate and determined activities today, in hopes of a future payoff. It is planting now to harvest later.

Patience is an activity. 




Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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