The Art of Patience

I believe very strongly in the power of patience. It's something I struggle with, but I also strive every day to be more patient. It is not easy! I started down this track about 2 yrs ago when I realized I was REALLY angry ALL THE TIME and so I bought a book on anger by the Dalai Lama, which made me really angry. It took me 2 years to work my way through the book, because the truth tends to hurt. Nevertheless, it was really insightful and has made me think about how I behave toward others and how changing myself may help me to be less angry. It has helped a lot. That said, it is still hard.
A lot of my anger was generated from feeling that my life, which had been hijacked by my family for most of my existence on Earth, was hijacked by the military just 2 yrs after I got free of the clutches of my crazy (in a clinical sense) family. I really had almost everything a young woman could want when I met my husband (good job, respect of my peers, stability, friends). I wasn't looking to get married or even date seriously. He put a major monkey wrench in the whole process, but it was a good thing. He has helped me think about the world in a lot of new ways that I wouldn't have been exposed to if it weren't for my intersection with him on the internet. But when we first got married, and especially when I left IVY U for several reasons including the military's involvement in my life via marriage, I was really pissed that my otherwise happy existence was upset by "them". I really hated on everything I could get the chance to kvetch about. It was a nasty dark place to be.
For all my frustration with BIG U, it was a really good decision for me to address, on my own terms, what I wanted from my life and as a result deal with a lot of my anger and frustration. It has been really good for me. What has also been really helpful is to try to put myself in the other person's shoes as much as possible. Sometimes this isn't possible, because I either don't understand or don't know the circumstances going on in their lives.
Military spouses are under enormous strain, between being a pseudo single-parent, adjusting to their spouses being here/gone/here/gone/gone/gone...etc, worrying when your spouse is gone, having to run 2+ people's lives far away from any sort of back-up (family), constant job changes, moves, friends moving, etc. It' exhausting and often overwhelming. This is why my #1 rule is: Don't rip on another military spouse. I did it one time in my life and to this day I hate myself for it. It was one of my lowest points on planet Earth. That's why I was really disappointed today when my friend sent me a link to a new blog and the first post was ripping on other spouses. I don't believe that was the person's intention (I think that he is just frustrated and stressed out), but that is how it came across to me. It was a rant on how people behave at the commissary, which stressed me out just reading it.
I am not going to say his points were per se invalid. We all need to be thoughtful of one another, no matter where we are. That said, I really believe that patience and charity, for lack of a better word, will go further on this issue than a tirade on how people behave. We need to be the change in the world we seek. We need to find a moment to think about how hard it must be to be young and in a new, strange place, maybe with a couple of kids and then add in a deployment and all of the other stuff and I can totally get how making a decision about peanut butter can be overwhelming and how you might forget to move your cart out of the aisle. It happens and for some people it happens often.
So what's the solution? Should we ban all people from interacting with others unless they meet our measure of human decency? That could get pretty lonely pretty fast. Maybe we could turn it around and the next time someone does something annoying in the commissary, we could say hi and see if they need help. Who knows maybe we'll make a friend or maybe the next time I have a day where putting something on that isn't ratty pjs seems like a monumental task, someone will be patient with me. God knows there are days when I need it. Either way, we are likely to find a great peace in our interactions with each other and peace is a valuable tool.
I hope that Army Dad is just having a stressful day and more importantly, I hope tomorrow will be better.

In other news, I spent all night studying for my oral exam practice talk on electron microscopy only to have my meeting with the advisors cancelled today 30 min before I was supposed to meet with them. This was followed by one of their students bitching to me about how they aren't meeting with her enough. She was somewhat unsympathetic to me when they were paying attention to her and ignoring me. Now we are in the same boat. I could be unsympathetic too (turn about and all that), but I feel her pain. So I am trying to forgive the advisors for forgetting me again and her for not understanding where I was coming from until now and hoping somehow, some way things will come together and I will be able to finish this despite the roadblocks in my path.