Waiting to See What’s Revealed

I have a friend with two decks of cards, Life Cards and Angel Cards. Every so often she pulls them out of the cupboard, and we each draw one from each deck without looking. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, but it drags us back into the present and shakes loose whatever future-focused spiral we’ve usually wandered into. We’ve turned it into a semi-regular thing, mostly so we remember to actually pause once in a while.

This week I pulled Revelation and Patience. Every week the cards seem to land on something eerily relevant to whatever’s actually going on in my life, and this week was no exception. It’s also the same theme that keeps coming back for me, over and over: wait, slow down, let things resolve on their own. I suspect it keeps showing up because I haven’t actually learned it yet.

Revelation told me to wait for life to reveal itself. Patience just said, well, patience, presumably while I wait for the revealing part. Two completely separate decks landing on the same message in the same week. A little eerie.

I’m not patient. I hate waiting. I like controlling the outcome.

What about you? Are you someone who sorts life into neat piles and tries to bend it into the shape you want? Do you see a problem and immediately start plotting the fix? Do you set yourself mental deadlines for when it all has to be resolved?

That’s me. That’s exactly what I do. I’m also a bit of a stress case because of it.

I’ve noticed that sorting life into tidy boxes mostly just sets me up to feel frustrated when reality refuses to fit inside them. Life never quite matches whatever I’d pictured. I’ve worked myself into the ground over deadlines, stressing myself and my kids out in the process, only to have the deadline move, or the whole project shift so much that all that frantic work stopped mattering anyway.

Logically, I know all of this: life never goes the way you expect, no matter how much energy you throw at it. I also know I can handle whatever comes my way. Which means I could, in theory, relax, take my time, live according to my own values, gather information, stay curious, and let the actual outcome emerge from the interplay of circumstances and people rather than from my own forcing it. I know this. I don’t live as I know it.

I was reminded of exactly this looking into my oldest son’s room recently. Disaster zone, as usual, now with a fresh layer of Halloween candy wrappers he apparently likes to keep around as souvenirs. I started in immediately: these have to go, this room is a mess, you need to clean it up. He mumbled, “I will.”

He won’t. He won’t because I never actually let him get there. I start freaking out and yelling long before he’d ever reach his own limit, so he cleans up grudgingly, under pressure, and learns nothing about his own tolerance for mess.

So, inspired by the cards, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to be patient and let life reveal itself for once.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want to control the outcome. What I’m actually hoping for is something closer to what happened to some friends of mine. Early twenties, living together, one of them decidedly not tidy. For about two years, their place followed the same pattern: mess building until the tidier one snapped and cleaned it herself. Over and over.

Eventually, she just stopped. She’d hit her limit on the number of times she could blow up about it, so instead she waited to see what would happen. I love this story.

Their place got bad. Genuinely bad. The kind of bad where a visiting dog could find a full meal on the floor.

Then one day, the person who’d apparently had no tolerance limit at all stood in the middle of the room, threw his arms up, and just yelled. He’d finally noticed. He started cleaning, entirely on his own, no nagging required. From that point on, he never let it get that bad again.

I’m hoping I can hold out as long as she did, though it might take a while. Mostly, I’m just curious what gets revealed. Will it play out differently? Will it make as good a story?

I’m hoping training myself to wait on the small stuff builds a kind of muscle I can eventually use on the bigger things too.

That’s my challenge to myself for now. Want to try waiting to see what gets revealed too?