I’m so grateful for my increasing surrender to patience. I guess I have that lightning strike last summer to thank for it. Internet just hasn’t been the same since then; not that it was great before, but it’s been utterly unreliable for the past six months. Last week I was grateful when Mike came by and spent an hour fixing things in and outside, and I had great speed for a few hours. That afternoon, download speed crashed from 34 to 2.3 megabits/second.

So I was back on the phone, and I didn’t even feel any aggravation at all, that’s how gigantic my patience has become. Allowing things to be as they are. Allowing doesn’t mean you like what’s happening, it means that you understand this is how it is right now, and that frees you to move forward and do what’s within your ability to do about it. I simply committed a few months ago to patiently, cheerfully, relentlessly hounding the company, until they started bumping my calls automatically to Advanced Support.

So Mike came back today, with his calm, even good cheer, and replaced the antenna, and also told me that he’d run into the tower guy in town, who had just replaced something on the tower, and they were both confident the combination would solve things once and for all. Well, fingers crossed, but it seems true. Everyone on that tower on this mesa can thank my squeaky wheel for getting that tower thing replaced! I’m grateful for a great connection so I could watch the tender, challenging, ‘Love on the Spectrum’ tonight while FaceTiming with my Kiki of the Northwest.

Patience is serving me so well these days in so many more ways than simply technical troubleshooting. Life is just so much easier now that I’m so patient. My expectations of myself and others have softened to more reasonable levels, I’m a better listener, I rarely ‘should’ on anyone else and no longer castigate myself for missteps. In the unexpectedly long time the repairs took today, work interrupted, I patiently waited twenty minutes to make my sandwich after spontaneously quick-pickling some red onions, romaine, and red pepper. They were quite tart, so I spread a little apricot jam on one side; I’m grateful I learned the trick of putting sweet jam on a savory sandwich from a couple of restaurants recently. I’m grateful for the locally milled Rouge de Bordeaux flour that gave this week’s bread a rustic color and flavor, and for the friends who delivered it. And grateful, as always, for the simple joy of a cheese sandwich.