I wanted to find the perfect wise quote about offering the gift of time, but it turns out that if you Google any number of variations on that theme you come up with total drivel.
I thought: well, I’ll just have to come up with that wise quote myself.
Sadly, it’s not quite as easy as I might have hoped.
I was thinking about the gift of time and the taking of time and the tremendous art of Not Rushing. I think of this most of all with horses, because everything I’ve ever done of any worth with horses involved estimating an amount of time, doubling it, doubling it again, adding on about a year, and then chucking out the whole timetable and stepping into a kind of cosmic acceptance.
We go in seasons, in the magic field. I though I might re-back Tern in the autumn, and now it is autumn and she is telling me she is not nearly ready, so we’ll think, perhaps, of spring. If that spring shades into summer, it really doesn’t matter.
I think, with my writers, of lovely landmarks. What would they like to get done by Christmas? Are they willing to take that time - those ten weeks, from the saffron leaves of October to the black afternoons of the winter solstice - to build themselves a writing habit? Or to find out what they really want? Or to map out their mission and reverse-engineer it?
The word ‘willing’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I do think you have to be willing. To take the time with the sensitive mare; to take the time with your creative mind; to take the time with your mission and ambition. If you are doing it sullenly, scuffing your feet like a child going back to school, it won’t take. You’ll just feel cross and resentful.
You may have to go back and find out about your stories around time, and retell them. I’ve done a lot of that, this year. I see hours differently now.
You might have to think of who gave you the most visceral, vivid lessons, and return to those lessons, and return again. My Florence gave me the most animated lessons in patience, and she’ll put me on a refresher course if she sees that I am forgetting my foundations.
Perhaps you have to retrain yourself to let go, instead of holding on. To loosen instead of bracing. To walk into the reality of time, instead of fighting it all the time.
All I know is that if you can allow yourself to take the time, you will find beauty and joy and accomplishment and satisfaction and revelation and all the good things. I love the good things. My red mare has taught me that they are worth waiting for. They can’t, and won’t, be rushed.