Summit Wellness: Gratitude - "A Patient of Patience"
By Matt Anthony - Summit FM Digital Media Specialist
“Have patience with all things, but first of all with yourself.” - Francis De Sales
My father had pretty much thrown in the towel.
All his years in the classroom as an experienced industrial arts teacher were being put to the test. Successfully navigating a high school student’s journey from never-having-picked-up-a-hammer to constructing-a-solid-end-table-that-won’t-topple-over appeared to be merely a secondary achievement, a blip on the radar.
The task at hand seemed Herculean: getting his son to digest the fine art of learning to drive a stick-shift.
His patience was wearing thin, though, and he decided that the day’s lesson would have to end. Hearing him vent his frustration at recounting my proclivity towards grinding metal and gears together in a symphony of torquey chaos, my uncle, standing nearby, suddenly asked for the keys to our olive-green 1971 Volkswagen Bug.
“Jump back in, Matt. Let’s go back up to the road behind the cemetery.”
It was a picture-perfect West Virginia evening as we rumbled up past the headstones and on to a fine gravel road. There, we switched positions, with me now behind the wheel…again…nervously shaking at the thought of more clutch-oriented torture.
“One pedal moves one way, and one pedal moves the other way,” he said. “Imagine them going past each other. They stop to say hello, just for a second. And then they move on. That’s it.”
So, I did imagine it. Slowly releasing the clutch with my left foot and slowly pressing the gas with my right. Each time the car would move forward, but not without first eliciting a bone-jarring bump and a raking of the gears, throwing us both forward, before I’d press in the clutch, stomp on the brake, and try it again.
“Just relax and be patient. You’ll find the sweet spot.”
And after 7 or 8 more tries, I did just that. It was an unexpected moment of satori. Suddenly, I generated just the right touch when releasing the clutch. And I tip-toed just the right amount of pressure with the accelerator. Both pedals paused ever-so-slightly to say ‘hello’ before heading in their own respective directions.
And finally, the drab olive-green 1971 Volkswagen Bug moved forward, unimpeded, surging with silky smoothness, and awaiting my command to increase the speed and propel us both into 2nd gear.
“Beware the fury of a patient man.” - John Dryden
When it comes to ‘patience’, I’m a work in progress. While my threshold for juggling multiple tasks without losing my cool seems formidable, there is a spot along the patience time-space continuum where the bottom seems to drop out and my humanity bares its ugly fangs.
Supposedly, the English poet, William Langland, scribbled the phrase ‘patience is a virtue’ back in 1360. It seems like we’ve had plenty of time to try to work this out. But, apparently not.
It’s why I tend to rewind the reels and re-visit that day near the cemetery with my Uncle Jerry. From time to time, when the struggles mount and the patience feels as thin as a New York-style pizza, I identify more with my father, whose tutoring had run out of gas on that otherwise gorgeous summer evening. I get it.
But my gratitude lies in the measured, calm, rational approach of a person who found a common thread between understanding, progress, and time. It’s an event in my life that I’ve reflected on a great deal lately, especially with the challenges confronting us over the past years. I miss my uncle, who passed away several years ago. And I miss that Volkswagen Bug, too, with its quirky steering, throaty sound, and the baseball bat-handle that served as a gear-shifter. Thankfully, I can return to the memory of that evening with the hopes of applying the same graceful demeanor and calm approach.