Vachon Imagined

Patience is the virtue that allows us to hold life as it is before we return it, surrender it, cast it onto someone else, or dismiss it entirely. It gives us the space to sit with our experiences, our thoughts, and our ideas of ourselves before deciding what to do with them. We may speak them, release them, transform them, or let them go, but first we notice them. We hold them.

This receptivity to life—the willingness to remain with it before turning it into action or meaning—requires patience. And patience teaches compassion. We become less concerned with analyzing people and ourselves, less occupied with explaining or judging, and more willing to make room for possibility. We begin to see ourselves and others as part of a greater whole rather than problems to be solved.

Everything exists first in the mind. It exists as potential, as imagination, as creation waiting to emerge. But it does not truly enter the world until someone holds it up and, like a child, says, Look what I found. Look what I made. Look what I created.