How that One Random Shoe Ended Up in the Road

For the last few months I've been going to Art Club, an informal gathering of artists that my friend MAK started. Now, Art Club isn't exactly what it sounds like. We look at art and talk about it; or we have a discussion question like, "What does it mean to be an artist?" We had never made art—until this past Wednesday.

Since no one had volunteered to facilitate our discussion for this week, MAK decided that it would be fun to do a little free writing with jazz music playing in the background. I've always been terrible at free writing. Maybe because my perfectionist side has trouble relaxing and letting the thoughts flow. My inner editor gets overly focused on the details of sentence structure, diction, and punctuation, which makes free writing more like torture than riding a roller coaster.

But on Wednesday night at Art Club, I let my thoughts carry me away. The result? I wrote fiction for the first time in about two years! It was exhilarating. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to make up stories.

Just for fun, here is one of the fictional scenes I wrote this week. The only edits I made were to add paragraphs. Enjoy! 

"How that One Random Shoe Ended Up in the Road" 

Even when you think your day cannot get any more awful, it will. Trust me. I've been there.

My boyfriend dumped me that morning. I spilled red Kool-aid all over my new white shorts. And then, as I was crossing the street to get in my car, I stepped in a pothole, with a car coming down the road toward me, and I couldn't get my foot back out. It wasn't a particularly large pothole, but it was large enough that my foot (and I have big feet) could go in it. Why my foot wouldn't come out, I have no freaking idea, but that car wasn't slowing down and I was like, "Holy crap, I'm going to die."

So I bent over, untied my shoe, and booked it across the street without it. And what do you know, that damn car hit the pothole and my shoe sailed through the air at least 25 yards and landed in somebody's driveway. He was just backing out and squashed my tennis shoe flat as a pancake. 

I swear this all happened in the space of 75 seconds.

Virtue of Victory

I used to consider myself a patient person, but no more.

Over the past six months, I’ve been through multiple transitions­­—leaving a volunteer program, moving three times, starting a new job—and each of these circumstances tested my patience in a different way. When leaving the volunteer program, I was impatient because I could not talk about the transition and didn’t know when it would happen. Lack of response to dozens of job applications left me wondering if I would just have to work at Taco Bell. My new job suits me, but during the beginning weeks I found myself often frustrated that I didn’t know how to access necessary information, where to get mailing labels, and who could answer questions about which project. 

Perhaps these circumstances are not worth losing patience over, but I frequently did. (And I still am. I was impatient over a project I was working on yesterday, because someone had decided to edit it before I was finished.) The waiting, the frustrations, made me uncomfortable and I wanted to speed the process up. I wanted an immediate answer. 

These transitions and my feeling impatient have led me to think about what it truly means to be patient. Merriam Webster Dictionary defines patient as: “able to remain calm and not become annoyed when waiting for a long time or when dealing with problems or difficult people.” Patient people never lose their inner peace. They realize that everything will work out in the end.

Patience seems linked to perseverance. Delays, difficulties, and disasters will happen, but patient people keep going in spite of all that. They wait for the plant to grow, the rain to come, the consolation to whisper peace. If the answer doesn’t come when they expect it or if a difficulty appears in their path, they persevere in calm. Eventually, the waiting ends and the patient have gained all that they waited for.  

Patience is victory.