I am musing today on impatience, and wondering to what extent it has been programmed into me by the North American culture. Consider what we know about the stages of the creative process. Those stages translate roughly into: preparation, gestation, illumination and implementation. Any guesses as to which of these steps our psyche most wants to skip? Yes, it is gestation. We are too impatient to walk away and let the stew simmer. We do not trust that parts of our body/mind system can be working on an idea or a problem in ways other than our word-focused, conscious thinking processes! Essence Intelligence, in embracing the body, mind and spirit as one, trusts process. It is not uncomfortable with letting things rest. Of course, this is natural. After all, our culture requires that we be “on” and producing all of the time. Essence Intelligence knows that production occurs at an invisible level. The healthy seed puts down deep roots before it pokes its head into the sunlight.

How do create a new, internal culture that lives more mindfully, trusting the seasons and cycles, and recognizing when kairos, the loaded moment, occurs before taking action? We are constantly checking the teapot, to see if that water is boiling, or even moving it to the microwave to speed things up. I believe we can begin to cultivate this alternative culture, a culture that trusts the cycles and processes vs. pushes for immediate gratification and outcome. We can cultivate it through the practice of savoring. Yes. We can practice savoring, all day long! Savor the tart/sweet taste of the wedge of orange. Savor the feel of the brush moving through one's hair. Savor the space between the words as we tap on our computer keyboards. Savor the questions, the unknowns.

I realized this morning that I was waiting for several questions to be answered: a callback from a friend regarding a proposed project, a check overdue in the mail, and an unanswered query about next week's schedule. I was impatient for answers on all three fronts. Then I decided to savor the unknowing. Clearly, all these questions would be answered, one way or another, by the end of the week, without my pushing or my mental impatience. And in the stillness of that savored moment, even without knowing the answers, everything was just fine. Peaceful. Essence has no issues with unknowns. It is only at level of ego, with its need to control, to make our world safe for us, that we feel this impatience with unknowns. As we savor our world, moment by moment, we let our bodies lead us back to a place of peace, where we know all we need to know now.

What is required to grow this part of ourselves, embrace the flexible genius of the psyche and set aside the control freak who wants results now, on demand? It is both an understanding of the brilliance of our own psyches, and a willingness to set aside that same brilliance, and “give it a rest,” trusting to a larger intelligence that includes but is not limited to one way of knowing, that of the neocortex.