Anybody have any spare patience? I’ve run out of my mine…

Nothing happens before it’s time, so embrace the patience…this is what we’re told and sold as a new age mantra.

And yet… (and yet… is my mantra!)

Typically at most post-secondary campuses, be it college or university, along with the standard registration building, the mess hall and computer labs is a forged path. Traditional campus paths delineations are sidewalks, cobblestones for rustic Ivy Leaguers and plain asphalt for institutions with less discerning taste.

These formally established walkways suggest, direct and in a way bully pedestrian foot traffic. This is the way to go, status quo is comforting because it requires no thought.

And yet… in addition to common and established sidewalks are forged paths. This is cut across a field a trail blazing path of trampled grass not always straight; not always smooth. The temptation to leave the sidewalks for these rare paths is strong…sometimes the temptation is to create one…one step at a time.

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

So…new path or old sidewalk: is that the best way forward?

“And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Also published on Medium.