One of the biggest life lessons I have learned since coming to Chicago and living in community has been patience. Now for those of you who know me, I am very much a people person but I also am always doing something and plan things out to every hour of my day. In college, my planner was my Bible and I would literally be lost with out it. Some people, cough Kevin cough, hated it because it ran my life but that was the way I got through college: being ridiculously busy, overscheduling myself, and helping as many people as I could. In Chicago, things are a little different. I still have plenty of things to do, plenty of people to interact with but I have yet to get a planner which is really annoying me but hopefully the secretary at Catholic Charities will be giving me one soon. Anyways, patience has come up in a lot of my time here in Chicago including not planning every weekend out four days in advance, waiting for my boss to get out of a meeting, traffic, at the grocery store waiting in the ridiculous lines, and my favorite: waiting for the "function based" computer system to download a file or page with client information on it. I have found myself taking a deep breath for a couple of seconds and getting the tension out of my body in order to realize the bigger picture of everything. This, without a doubt, is going to be one of my biggest challenges this year. I remember having trouble with patience in South Africa, Alabama, and Virginia but someone told me/I realized that people may do things slower or differently then I normally do it which is culturally based I guess. The main difference I am finding this year is the difference in lifestyle between my life at Merrimack (aka go, go, go) to my life in Chicago/volunteering (aka slower but still busy/focusing on only a couple of things at a time such as community, prayer, and service). Patience has always been something I struggle with at times in my life and I really hope that this year of volunteering will help me to filter out all the craziness in my life and really focus on what is most important to the people I am serving, my roommates, God, and lastly myself. One of the themes of orientation was making your life about "we" instead of "me" and I strive every day to live a more selfless lifestyle so I can fully embrace everyone around me in order to fully serve them and God. Thank you all for your patience and I hope that I will find more in my life soon.
Chicago fact: So this is completely contradicatory to what this post was about but since Chicago drivers are often very inpatient, I have learned to become a very aggressive driver. Not because I want to but because I would get driven off the road if I didn't drive aggressively. Go figure.
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