It’s quite hard to write interesting blog posts when the only thing that we seem to be doing is Waiting.
We are waiting for the snow to melt, so we can go and buy another load of hay for the llamas. We are waiting for the fields to dry out, so that my sister can come and collect a trailer load of llama poo to fertilize her garden. And we are still waiting to hear from the estate agent about the house and land we want to buy.
After Simon tried unsuccessfully to contact him yesterday by phone, reaching only answer-machine-hell, we received another email saying that he had (at last) read ours, and would contact the owner of the second lot of additional land that might be for sale, and get back to us “le plus vite possible”.
We are beginning to suspect that the agent has a multiple personality disorder (each time he responds to us he is a different person!), and that, in his reality, only Mondays exist, (so that when he says he will get back to us ‘tomorrow’ , we will hear from him the following Monday).
But we are calm, and cheerful, and endeavouring to “adopt the pace of nature” whose “secret is patience” (Ralph Waldo Emerson). And, given that “the secret of patience is doing something else in the meanwhile”, I am passing some of this eternal Waiting Time, engaged in the highly fruitful activity of trawling the internet for wise or amusing quotes about patience.
Having had a few days of feeling reasonably relaxed about it all – after all, we have agreed a price, and the agent is (albeit intermittently) maintaining contact with us – I experienced another surge of anxiety today, when Simon discovered the property for sale on another agent’s site. Whilst Simon was pleased at the discovery of a different, and more interesting set of photographs of the house, I was horrified at the thought that someone else might, at this very moment, be viewing the house, without our agent’s knowledge, and preparing to make a higher offer. Suddenly, Ambrose Bierce’s description of Patience as “A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue” felt more apposite.
I realise of course that my problem with the whole waiting thing, is that I am suffering the Suffering Caused by Craving. I really, really, REALLY WANT THAT HOUSE. I long for it. I yearn for it. Despite knowing that desire leads to pain, and despite the fact that my own experience of life has taught me that as soon as I get what I wish for, I will start wanting something more, I am still slicing up my Happiness Pie, and saving big chunks of it for later.
I really could do with taking a few behavioural tips from the llamas and chickens. I don’t mean I should start crapping indiscriminately around the house. But I do wish I could adopt their stoic attitude to the less pleasant aspects of life (such as the current spell of very cold, icy weather or waiting to hear from estate agents), and just sit-it-out. The llamas always come across as placid and philosophical of course – which is one of the reasons why it’s so hard ever to tell if there is anything wrong with them – but today, even the usually busy, frenetic chickens have hunkered down in a sheltered cranny under the balcony and just sat, (with the exception of Pretty Chicken who adopted instead a one-legged flamingo pose), only moving to come running when a big bowl of warm maize porridge appeared to lighten their dull day.
I would really like to be a wise person.
A wise person,
Understanding the Dharma,
By insight, free of longing
And free of desire
Is calm as a still pool.Itivuttaka, a collection of 112 short discourses of the Buddha
So far from being calm as a still pool, I am more like a rush of dirty bath-water gurgling down a very long drain. I discover with, some considerable consternation, that my feelings on the matter of patience are more accurately summed up in a quote from Margaret Thatcher in the Observer in 1989;
I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
