I’ve always sort of prided myself on maintaining patience as a virtue. Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t look back and see times when my patience failed (good God, my teenage years), but on the whole I regard it as a strength of mine. But now, as I prepare to exit my twenties, a decade in which a freakin’ lot has happened, just…damn.
I feel like it used to be a lot easier to be a patient person.
Nowadays most of us have heard about Spoon Theory, and if you haven’t, here’s the gist: We all only have so much battery life to us, and that’s in regards to different kinds of energy – physical, mental, emotional, social, and otherwise. And as will happen to all of us, given enough time, those energies and stores of them wear out, wear a little low, and need to be replenished.
Spoon Theory, as far as I understand it, basically represents that energy pool for socializing as a handful of spoons, and any time you might hang out with somebody in a social setting, it costs you some spoons. Everybody has a different amount of spoons on them at any given time. Somebody might have a whole drawer full of spoons, while someone else might be all tapped out, and the whole point to the thought exercise is that sometimes people just don’t have spoons to give out. It’s okay to not have the energy for something sometimes.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be imagined with spoons, I think that’s just a funny, palatable way of imagining it. But lately, I’ve come to realize something based off of something we’ve all probably heard somewhere: Butter makes everything better.
Potatoes, pancakes, toast, corn, Slip n’ Slides – everything.
And I think the same applies here.
I’m finally reading The Lord of the Rings after a long while of, well, not, and while spoons are well and good, Bilbo’s quote to Gandalf before leaving the Shire articulates the feeling the best: “’Well-preserved indeed!’ he snorted. ‘Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can’t be right. I need a change, or something.’”
See? Leave it to Tolkien and a simile involving butter to accurately articulate the feeling of needing respite and the toll that regular, daily adult life can exact on the person living it.
Count your blessings, of course, and realize the Good Old Days you might be living through in the moment, but allow yourself the mercy too of recognizing when you just feel like some thin-ass butter scraped across too much of the Goddamn Bread of Responsibility.
The Light of Day 