Imagine Christmas Eve in Walla Walla, 1990. The stockings were hung, Santa’s cookies and milk set out neatly on the mantle, and sugar plums were dancing through each of our heads as we slept. Or so it first appeared. On closer inspection, my brother, just dying to see the goods Santa brought him, decided to get up at 2 a.m. and race downstairs to check out his toys. Thrilled, he played happily until 3:30 a.m. when the joy wore off, and he realized he only had the rainbow-flicker of the Christmas lights to accompany him. The only way to bring back the excitement was to wake me up so I could see my stuff, too. On it went again, the exhilaration rising and falling like a roller coaster before both of us ended up sorely disappointed that Christmas had ended by 5:00 a.m.
We learned our lesson. It’s best to have patience and wait until the time is right both on Christmas Eve, and with bigger things too. But I’m not always the most patient person. And this year I’m busy with a lot of projects that excite me as much as Santa did. I’m planning wedding, working on a committee to get a P-patch going at North Seattle C.C., and writing my first blog. As many of you fiancés, committee members, and bloggers know, these things require a lot of a certain virtue.
It takes planning and gumption to tackle wedding planning each day, and it takes the same stuff to write this blog, and to watch the P-Patch take shape at North. I watch the spike on the blog readership chart each Saturday, but then feel that familiar fall on Monday when the line touches down on the X-axis. I hear good news about the P-Patch, but can become disappointed by the seemingly long journey ahead.
Recently I’ve had some new perspective on the idea of patience. I went to a sustainability meeting a few days ago at North and, the Coordinator, Christian Rusby, framed the idea of patience in a way that didn’t make it seem like procrastination. He said that it wasn’t the right time to go full speed ahead with the P-Patch, but it also wasn’t time to just sit back and do nothing.
Instead, he proposed that we be strategic. We’ll start the momentum for the project in the spring when people are excited about being outside and want to plant things. Once we have interest, we can get formal approval from the administration and work on a grant. True, we probably won’t have a P-Patch at North until next spring, but by being patient we will have one sooner than if we jumped the gun and the plan was rejected altogether.
The fitting part, is that I realized that my other goal for the year, growing food, also takes this same strategy, and the same willingness to be actively patient. You have to wait for the right season and temperature before you can plant certain things, and then you have to tend to them while they slowly grow. If you try to plant basil in winter it will surely shrivel. If you try to write a popular blog in four weeks, it will most likely parish too. So, I’m going to practice a little patience in the weeks to come, and see what sprouts in the spring.
For more information about the North P-Patch Project, visit:
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