I’d like to tell this to the stores that have had Halloween candy on their shelves since Labor Day. It’s not time yet!
But this is not about the commercialization of our holidays…but another reminder from my favorite teacher, Miss Nature, on the topic of patience.
Last week, Alan and I took a spontaneous drive up into the mountains to check out the aspens. While we went in search of gold, we found mostly green and somewhat drab-looking trees until we came upon one glorious patch of color. Over the weekend, we decided to go for a hike in another area. The trail would have been stupendous at peak leaf color. The high point offered sweeping views of aspens in all directions. Instead of oohing and aahing over yellow-painted slopes, mostly lime-green leaves looked back at us.
I am an aspen groupie, leaf-peeper junkie, fall fanatic, or whatever you want to call someone who cannot wait for the leaves to change and stand in the glow of an aspen forest. It is forest bathing at its best. But Mother Nature was telling me…it is not time yet.
It had me thinking about waiting and patience and the times when life tells me, It’s not time yet. Hold your horses.
I would not call myself a patient person. It’s one thing to wait for something positive, like fall colors, but when I don’t know what is going to happen, the mind goes wild. I’ve always said that waiting was the worst part of my health journey. It was limbo hell. I could handle bad news, but my brain went crazy when it didn’t know, and it made **it up if it didn’t have facts to tell it otherwise. And the stories it told were often much worse than any real possibility. I’d always have to talk myself off the ledge. Which is completely normal. When we don’t know, we often assume the worst. Our brain translates the uncertainty into a potential threat and tends to exaggerate it. That’s what brains do.
So what was Miss Nature teaching me with her still-green aspen trees and my worst-case scenario brain?
It was a good reminder that not all waiting ends in disaster. Uncertainty does not always mean impending doom. I’m not saying I believe in some fantasy future where everything is rainbows and unicorns, only that I can catch my negative and anxious thoughts and dial them down a bit. I don’t have to believe everything my brain tells me.
As much as my brain loves to be a Negative Nelly, maybe I need to wait for things in life as I do for the beautiful gold of the aspen trees—with anticipation of such beauty and splendor that my mind can only imagine golden slopes. It sounds Pollyannaish, but if I look back at any of the periods of limbo or waiting in my life – even the long dark days of worry or sadness – I see that all those uncertain paths eventually led to better places.
Maybe the real task is to be in that limbo space with the same trust I have in the leaves turning magnificent colors and know that life is unfolding its beauty…on its own time.
