Patience

When I finally got an assistant, after several years of the position not being funded, I told her two things: “You won’t learn this job in 6 days, 6 weeks or 6 months;” and “There are at least a hundred mistakes to make. I know, because I’ve made them all.”

I wasn’t that good of a manager with my last assistant. Granted, he didn’t seem to like the concept of work or the impositions it posed to his social life. That probably made me more intolerant of his mistakes.

And it could be the case that my current assistant really likes having things to do, and I cut her some slack.

Still, things that might have pissed me off a few years ago don’t anymore. I’m amazed at my patience with her. I’m assuming that, if I had been kidnapped and replaced by aliens, I would know. They would be doing strange things to me instead of letting me go to work every day.

So it has to be me going to work every day.

Maybe my patience is just a by-product of me dealing with Shannon over the last few years. Maybe my priorities have changed after such a hard and painful year. Maybe I’m just giving people room to be human.

Since Daddy died, Mama and I have talked several times about why some things just ain’t that important. We were mostly talking about me being gay and my sister not speaking to me. Two topics that wouldn’t have come up with such honesty before he died.

Maybe some of that bled over into my workplace.

I know that dealing with Shannon’s mental health issues has helped teach me understanding. I still get impatient sometimes, because I tell him one thing and he hears another. But, by and large, I have learned the patience of Job.

It doesn’t come naturally. Most of us have to learn how to be patient. And I am chief among them.

I don’t know when that fundamental change occurred. Maybe it’s a product of aging, but I doubt it. I know too many people who are a good bit older than me who remind me of myself as an adolescent.

Most likely, it’s life-experience. Even though I haven’t consciously done it, I think that my experiences of the last year or so have made abundantly clear what is important and what is not.

Now, if someone could convince my older sister of that, I’d be most grateful.

If you try, good luck.