I am not a woman of patience.  I don’t know if it is my nature or whether I became so from working as a nurse.  You have to be sharp of vision, fleet of feet and move, move, move.  There’s a cartload of medications to pass out, baths to be done and call bells to answer.  The very walls vibrate with DO IT NOW.  I got no time to wait.

It’s no wonder that I throw up my hands in the air  with my hair standing up on end if it takes me more than a nano second to do anything.  Imagine what I am like if I don’t know how to do something and have to read some directions.  I feel myself tensing already, my hair electrifying. You wouldn’t want to be around me.

But I am slowly changing.  I am no longer a nurse.  I am the queen of self-help, you know.  Wait.  I have to take a slow deep breath to relax.  Okay.  Better.  Having read a ton of how to books and listening to hours of Dharma talk,  I’m putting it all to practice, bit by bit.  Did Benjamin Franklin say patience is a virtue?

I am getting patient enough to develop some culinary skills.  I’ve learned to Google recipes and came out with some winners.  Mind you recipe directions are fairly simple and easy, at least the ones I choose.  Look, I can even take the time to chop up some ingredients and mixed them up with some ground pork.  Then I put a teaspoonful of the mixture in a wrapper to shape into a pot sticker or wonton.  Mind you, I was listening to my Dharma woman, Pema Choudron,  on Start Where You are the whole time.

I tried to keep that in mind.  I have the time.  Take the time.  Be patient.  Start where you are.  Keep at it.  Make pot stickers and wontons.  I have the stick-to-itness.  I must have it if I wan-a-ton.  That’s how I made it back from our long walk to Broadway, a step at a time, stopping for a rest when needed.

My words for the novel are not flowing easily.  Sometimes I sit and stare at my blank screen.  But I have an introduction and three chapters written for a total of 4619 words.  It is very exciting.  I feel a sense of purpose – a job I love to go to in the morning.  From reading Janet Evanovich’s How I write, Secrets of a Bestselling Author, I am doing okay.  I am having fun and making progress.  That is what matters.