Letter from the Editor: The Power of Patience

“The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.” – Paulo Coelho

Dear Readers,

With summer approaching on the sunny horizon and the calendar finally reaching the half-way point of what seemingly feels like a bit of a rough year, it’s amazing to see how fast time flies. I am completely shocked at how quickly 2016 has gone by. While it personally started a bit rough for me, it got relatively easier thanks to family and friends, work I can be proud of and a future I have faith in that will be waiting for me.

Whether it is good or bad, in many ways I think life is a lot like a book. When we start out, we know nothing—a lot like our own life. Along the way, we come across good chapters and bad chapters, but we never skip ahead due to the discomfort because we simply cannot. It would not make any sense to do so. And quite frankly, you can’t cheat life no matter how much you decide to deny the circumstances unfolding. Instead, we endure pages upon pages of uneasiness and learn things amid the pain and apprehensiveness in hopes to gain some sort of knowledge. With time, those past chapters that were hard to understand at first create a greater comprehension and the other chapters that lie ahead start to make more sense. As the story develops, so do its characters—that is, if we’re lucky. With every page turned, there’s a plot twist or a lesson we learn to a conclusion we’ve long awaited.

The only problem with such a notion of relating life to books is many of us will never finish the book before we die. Many of us will never understand the chapters no matter how far we go ahead and continue looking back to try and make sense of things. Finally, many of us will cheat our way through to march ahead without ever understanding their current place because they’re too afraid to accept the direction their life will take them.

If there’s one thing I learned from having my heart broken last year, it is that living through your gut was better than living in denial of it. Additionally, all that heartache showed me exactly what I needed to. I discovered we must have faith in the timing of our life and practice confidence in patience. While it is a true conquering virtue and can be bitter at times, it serves a purpose because it makes us pay attention to what we need heed most.

That said it goes without saying that patience can be a real struggle. From waiting at that traffic light to that lineup at Starbucks awaiting our coffee, to wondering when your partner will finally pop the question, we experience impatience every day. While it’s a painful stressor we experience every day, researchers at the University of Chicago discovered acquiring patience can actually bring about good things.

Accomplished through meditation, positive talk and mindfulness, patience has been proven to be a positive attribute and a true characteristic asset. In fact, people who try their hardest to be patient and suffer through an uncomfortable wait have actually become more patient. The university researchers found that making people wait to make a decision can improve their patience because the process of waiting can make the reward for waiting appear more valuable.

You know that saying that “patience is a virtue?” Well, I’ve come to realize in my own life that it is not exactly a truth. Saying such a thing regarding patience would denote that it’s easy, when really it’s about a deep inner strength and probably one of the hardest battles you’ve ever faced. Patience is hard, takes practice and rough experiences to acquire such insight. Through the good and bad chapters, having patience is more or less about having an unfaltering inner strength to stick to what you know and trust yourself. One of the greatest ties to patience is knowing when to overcome your fears. Fear has a funny way of playing with us and working on our insecurities when we least expect it. But the truth is by waiting and letting life play out the way it needs to through the spaces in which we allow, we begin to live a little more freely. If we want to be more patient, we need to start to trust ourselves that things are going to be alright because at the end of the day, it’s always going to be about us first.

{Image Credit: Unsplash/Rachael Crowe}

Life moves at its own rhythm and trust me when I say, a lot of us hate that. Perhaps it’s our own spoiled nature in that we have grown accustomed in this digital age to prompt responses and information that flows at our fingertips. Everything needs to happen at this very moment for us to feel better—to ease our anxieties. But the truth is, everything is going to work out exactly as it should. Without going into the worldly discussion of freewill, the Universe and divine order, things in life might not happen as quickly as we want them because timing is everything.

However, time is not linear. Time is something generated by man in this relative world to measure days and create an order. Sold to us as a precious commodity to be more productive and all purposeful, time has been looked at as something that is real and tangible, when really it isn’t any of those things.

When we rush our lives and ourselves by deciding upon things in a moment, we’re selling ourselves short of our real purpose. Without finding any meaning, we hurry through life, losing our serenity and that blissful moment of joy. We also tend to overlook our own melody of feelings, experiences and heart that which others come to understand and mutually admire.

What many don’t realize is that patience has the power to shape our talents and passion into a genuine achievement, and that too drives our persistence forward. Patience is not a resignation or a failure in self-worth either. It’s an empowering and distinctive skill to have—knowing you seek out what you want when you know it’s ready for you. If we hope to achieve our dreams and live out our passions, we must have the enthusiasm to overcome challenges and this comes solely from being patient and waiting.

Of course, it’s no fun being a tortoise in life but that little creature got to enjoy it the most. By constantly moving at a natural pace without observing time, we can be more expressive and live in the moment. It can be scary to wait. We all have anxieties—I have many and wonder about them constantly, but when we banish our fears and trust our own being to be more patient, we are harnessing an energy that becomes empowering to our soul. When you move at your own pace, you not only get to know yourself better, but you feel more confident in your choices, while appreciating the journey.

As we celebrate June and our anniversary on June 16, I cannot tell you how happy or thrilled I am that we will be celebrating our fourth anniversary. I never would have imagined we would be here today—and who would have thought, this venture stemmed from a broken heart? From amazing interviews with stellar personalities, to informative pieces on life and wellness, The Hudsucker has really grown into its own sort of fingerprint on the worldwide blogosphere.

We have an amazing team too—all who have been patient with this site’s progression and watched it flourish into this powerful digital magazine that allows readers to find content they can appreciate.

Through all these years and getting to this point now where we get to work with media outlets and companies, it’s amazing to see that time and patience can not only help you to do better in life, but it makes you more authentic. Working hard really pays off, especially when you have a dream that you love and want to do really well. Life is unpredictable, but if we reframe certain situations in order to fit our current style of living, we also tend to become much happier. Working at The Hudsucker since 2012 has been a pure joy for mine. Every day, I get to overlook wonderful content from a talented roster of writers who find joy in sharing their passions through a variety of topics and subjects. It certainly doesn’t get any better than that.

This business venture has shown me that if we let go of perfection and any worry about the future—if you can do what you need to do now to make it happen, then the time will come for you. We don’t need to seek it out ourselves. What counts the most in life is sticking to a system of objectives and having faith in patience—trusting the timing of our life. When you trust yourself enough and persevere, watching those ripples of life bounce along that clear, serene surface help you understand what you need by the end of your result.

It takes time, which is something many of us worry about every day. But if you are persistent in your endeavors and prioritize your passion, patience is a true benefit to help you keep sane.

Sincerely,

Tania Hussain
Editor-in-Chief, The Hudsucker

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