As I’ve mentioned in a previous post , I’m not a very calm person. Instead, I tend towards impatience, exuberance and anxiety, but not necessarily all at once or in that order. 

In the 1990s I made several attempts to calm down. I tried a meditation class at our local synagogue in Champaign, Illinois, led by a Buddhist Zen master who was also Jewish and thought you could combine the two traditions. Our homework was to meditate every day, starting with five minutes and building up from there. So the next morning, I sat on a chair in the dining room of our house with the sun pouring in the windows from the east. I put my hands on my knees, planted my feet solidly on the floor. My beloved Golden Retriever mix, a rescue dog, who was always at my side, lay down near my feet.  I tried to sit quietly, but she got anxious, kept prodding me with her nose. Every time I tried to meditate quietly, she continued to prod, thinking I was dead.  Finally, I just gave up.

About the same time, my husband tried a meditation class, led by a psychologist at the Park District, which met at the local high school. The small group who assembled was instructed to close their eyes and think of a kind, benevolent figure to focus on. “Think of God, or Jesus,” he said.  Well that didn’t work for Tony. He’s Jewish, but agnostic. He had a problem with God or any authority figure for that matter. When the instructor told him to visualize any figure that made him happy, he thought, “Frosty the Snowman,” barely able to contain his laughter. Needless to say, he didn’t go back.

A couple of years later, a close friend of mine was dying of a rare kind of uterine cancer and I was with her the night she died. Around the same time, my mother in Rowayton, Connecticut, had slipped into the sad silence of Alzheimer’s, spending most of her days in a rose velour recliner. I needed to escape from all this sadness and stress, but I also needed to go back to visit my mother on our winter break. There had been an article in the New York Times about a guest house run by the nuns of St. Birgitta in Darien, Connecticut, less than ten miles from our family home. For a ridiculously small amount of money a day, you could get a room and meals. It was in a beautiful place with acres of wooded land and adjacent to the Long Island Sound. It appeared to be a slice of heaven. I only told my brother Wolf about my plans and he agreed to drive me there. I’d disappear for two and a half days. I didn’t know they would be interminable.

            We drove up the long winding driveway and I rang the doorbell. Down the long dark hall came a nun in a full grey habit:  “Oh my God, it’s a nun!” I exclaimed, “What did you expect?” Wolf replied. I guess I hadn’t thought about how religious the place was, that it really was a convent. She opened the door, greeted me seriously and showed me to my tiny room upstairs, with its little iron bed and cross on the wall over the headboard of the bed. I’d never slept under a cross before! When it was time for dinner, a nun hit a big iron gong with a hammer to call us down.

            I joined the small group of women sitting around the table. They seemed to know each other but made no attempt to talk to me. The dinner was nicely prepared, served by a silent nun, but suddenly it hit me that I always have wine with dinner, and I had no wine. Was it possible to drink wine there, to bring a bottle? But it was a several miles walk into Darien and the wine store, and they were expecting a big snowfall.  Oh God, I was going to have to go dry for three days. 

            A couple of the women seemed to have been living there for some time, maybe as residents, and one just didn’t seem quite right to me. Another was an artist from nearby Rowayton, who came once in a while. I was the only Jew, but that was fine with me because I like interfaith things. I’d read that the nuns said prayers every morning in Latin, sang Gregorian chants and that you could sit at the entrance to their chapel and listen in.  Well, that sounded very interesting.

But what was I going to do with the rest of my days? I had not brought any work with me because to my mind, that was the whole idea, for this to be a retreat. I didn’t have a book to read for pleasure, or paper to write on if I had any thoughts. No wine, no books, no writing. I got more and more anxious, thinking about those empty hours, stuck in the guest house with absolutely nothing to do. I found a small library, but the only thing I could find to read was a history of the nuns of St. Birgitta. I read it over and over again, sitting alone in the living room (where did the other people go during the day, i wondered?).  There was a TV (I don’t watch TV regularly, but I was desperate), with only a couple of channels: one for Latin mass, and a secular one, with news about the Bobbitt case.  Remember the woman who cut off her husband’s penis (furious at his abuse and possible philandering), and her dis-membered husband with the unfortunate last name? That’s what was in the news when I was there in January 1994 during my retreat.

A distinguished looking clergyman entered the room where I was watching the Bobbitt case, and sat down, probably expecting to hear mass. We soon went in to lunch. The nun who served the food was deferential to him—he was an important man from South America who visited them every so often. It seemed like the one moment of excitement in their life. But it was just him and me at the table. I couldn’t think of anything to say, didn’t know what to talk about beyond asking him where he came from, except to bring up the bizarre and (to me) hysterically funny case of Lorena Bobbitt and her husband. I pictured the panicked husband running around trying to find his penis! And so, I asked my lunch companion, sitting in his fancy clerical robes, if he’d heard about it, and if that sort of thing went on where he lived. He actually came close to laughing. I liked him.

Even after making such a connection, I thought to myself, I can’t stay here, I’ve got to get out. I tried to take a walk, but the snow was too deep to walk in. I’m not meant for a retreat, I thought, my tears turning to icicles as I walked. I’m not meant to sit quietly with nothing to do for hours and days. I’m a failure. What others found tranquil, I found stifling. I need the company of friends. I thought of my mother, riddled with Alzheimer’s, sitting and sitting, hour after hour, blank. Every time I visited her, I thought, please God don’t let that happen to me. And now here I was stuck in a guest house run by silent nuns, sitting in a beautiful area, but ice bound. Doing nothing felt like being dead.

And then it occurred to me… My dog had been right. 

I wish I were more patient.

I can sit and work for hours, but that’s because I have a persistent personality, but I’m able to admit that I’m just not a patient person.

Patience requires submission, a submission to the reality that not everything is in our control. One of my favorite seventeenth-century English devotional poets, George Herbert, captures so well in his lyric poems this difficulty. So many of his poems express his struggle to submit to God, but they are also more generally about the struggle to accept disappointments and things that are beyond our control. I love the deceptive simplicity of Herbert’s beautiful poems, the way he poetically articulates the struggle for patience. “The Collar,” for example, features a speaker who rages against not being rewarded by his “Lord,“ as does the speaker in “Affliction IV,” who suffers so many losses, yet is expected to be patient. At the end of “The Collar,” as the speaker grows, “more fierce and wild,” he thinks he hears, “one calling,” and replies, “…my Lord.” This acceptance of the situation, a recognition of a higher power, provides a peaceful resolution to the poem, at least for a moment. 

If only life were so easy.

Patience is at odds with the belief you have (or have the right to) “absolute authority,” that you can control everything. When suddenly you are faced with a challenge to that ability, you can explode. There is, of course, a range of impatience which, at its extremity can lead to violence, which we see every day in the news in its various forms. Elder abuse; the frustrated angry teenage father who kills his infant son; the angry president frustrated over the delay in his wall, who suggests that border guards shoot migrants in the legs (to slow them down), or that we should have a trench with water (like a moat?) filled with snakes or alligators and more. It terrifies me, thinking someone (let alone an American president) could even imagine such things, and needs to be talked out of them by staff who explained they were illegal, not to mention, potential crimes against humanity.

Compared to that, my impatience is nothing. Still, impatience is the sin I have to confess. It’s that time of year - the ten days between Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur - when as a Jew I’m supposed to take an accounting of myself, think of where I’ve fallen short of what I should be, where I miss the mark, like an arrow going wide from its path. The Hebrew word, Hata, which is translated as “sin,” means to go astray, as if one has taken the wrong course, strayed from the right path, and thus not reached the goal. Teshuvah, a return to the path, is what we try to do during those Ten Days of accounting, which culminate in Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). But it’s not work that’s over in one day. We are to commit ourselves to continue working during the coming year.

For years, I’ve tried to do my best, tried to do the right thing. I’m honest, compassionate, empathetic, perhaps to an extreme. I try to do kindnesses to others in my daily encounters.  I’ve been told I make the world a better place through my teaching and writing. I’m not one to feel riddled by guilt. In fact, “sin” is not a word I use often or feel is helpful. I feel pretty good about how I live my life.  But admittedly, the last two years have been very hard, and now, on Yom Kippur, I must confess to God, my impatience, my deviation from how I would like to be.  Yes, I get annoyed with being put on hold for an hour, or with problems with my computer or technology. Who doesn’t? But patience has become so difficult in one particular part of my life—dealing with my husband’s progressive neurological disease.

When the doctors first diagnosed him four and a half years ago with what they thought was Parkinson’s, my rabbi said, “may God bless you with patience.” I did not realize how much I would be called on to exercise it.  As the disease has progressed, the demand for my patience has increased in ways I’d never imagined.  First, there was my need for patience when my husband moved and ate slowly, then even more slowly; patience when I wanted to be at work rather than going with him to see multiple doctors; patience when he needs help eating and drinking, when I spend time every day running out for his food or supplies, and when everything takes longer than expected. As more things are taken away from my husband, as he loses his independence, a similar thing happens to me. I’ve lost my independence. As he suffers, I suffer. This is the bond of love. I feel frantic, anxious, and, yes, impatient. A little sedative in the morning or early evening makes me more patient for a couple of hours. Alternatively, I try taking deep breaths, but they don’t work. I pray for patience, or at least endurance.

Monks are patient. I know people who spend long periods meditating, or even go to Buddhist retreats and seem to be more patient as a result. Maybe it’s just a matter of practice. But when would I have such time?

 I think I was born impatient. My father always praised my mother for being “cool, calm and collected.” Those qualities enabled her to survive a lot in our home, even to accept her decline into Alzheimer’s in old age.  I didn’t inherit these qualities. My mother called me jokingly, “the white tornado” (after the popular commercial for Ajax Liquid Cleaner in the 60s). My mother never raised her voice, but I’ve been known to shout, as well as curse liberally.  Even my blood pressure is “volatile”—meaning that medication can’t fully control it.  “A hot reactor,” my cardiologist once called me. In the early ‘90s there was a country song by Alabama that I’d listen and sing along to, with its refrain, “I’m in a hurry to get things done. I rush and rush until life’s no fun. All I really gotta do is live and die, but I’m in a hurry, I don’t know why.”  I remember my teenage son once saying, “Happy Mother’s day, even though you really need to calm down!”

I can be exuberant and joyous—that’s the upside of my nature--but aren’t those very things at odds with calm and patience?

Impatience is natural if not nice. I’m doing the best I can in a difficult situation, where I never know what the next day will bring. My husband knows this and forgives me, because he knows how hard I try to meet so many people’s demands. But my impatience is potentially dangerous, to myself (I could have a heart attack, God forbid!) as well to as my husband. And so this Yom Kippur I promise myself, my husband, and God, to strive for patience, to try to restrain my impatient nature and return to a better way.

But I know I need help and can’t do it alone, for I do not have “absolute power.”