On patience and baking brownies

When I was a senior in college, my roommate dragged me to a tarot card reader who was doing readings at a local bar.

“She doesn’t believe in this stuff!” my roommate exclaimed to the shawl-wrapped woman as we sat down. “But I know you’re going to change her mind!”

The woman did not, in fact, change my mind. However, in the midst of reading tarot cards, she did give me one of the most valuable pieces of advice I’ve ever received. So much so, that I still think about it and share it with my clients today.

As she was pulling up her cards in a geometrical arrangement that seemed to mean something to her, this tarot card reader told me about a relationship conundrum the cards told her I was facing.

“You see what it could be with this person,” she claimed. “and you’re not wrong. But the timing is not what you want it to be. And if you try to force it into the timeline you think it should be on, you won’t get a compromise. You’ll get nothing.”

Despite my skepticism, she was nailing a situation in my life right on the head. But then again, I was a 20-year old college student, so the presumption that I was impatient around a relationship situation wasn’t like, the most outlandish thing ever.

Anyways, I digress. Back to her advice.

“It’s like if you were baking brownies,” she continued. “You get the box of brownie mix, and you combine all of the ingredients. The instructions on the box tell you to cook it for 20 minutes at a certain temperature. 

You set the temperature, put the pan in the oven, set a timer, and 20 minutes later you remove the pan. You look at the tray, and much to your surprise and dismay, you see brownie batter instead of brownies. 

So, you put the brownies back in the oven. You wait another 10 minutes. You take them out. Still batter.”

“The only option you have at this point,” she explained, “if you still want brownies, is to put the pan back in the oven for as long as it takes for the brownies to cook. 

I know you followed the instructions. I know they only said 20 minutes. I know this is frustrating. But if you try to take them out now and eat them, you won’t be eating subpar brownies. You’ll be eating raw brownie batter. It’s not the same thing.”

I felt seen. And frustrated.

And she was right. Not just about the situation in my mind at that time - but about countless other situations like it in both my life and the lives of the people around me.

Sometimes in life we try to make proverbial brownies.

We get the best ingredients. We follow all of the instructions. We do everything right. And yet, it takes more time than it ‘should’. 

And if we want those brownies, there’s nothing to do, but to keep placing the brownies in the oven and wait.

The moral of the story: some things take time.

Not only do some things take time, sometimes things take longer than we think they should. Than we want them to. Than they did the last time. Than they did for someone else.

The concept that patience is a virtue isn’t for the faint of heart. 

Patience is a virtue because there is always room to be more patient - with ourselves, with each other, with our results, with our process.

And not only that.

Oftentimes, it’s only through exercising patience that we ultimately get where we want to be. 

How could that be? Well, patience is a release of sorts. 

When we practice patience, we are releasing our attachment to the timeline we have in our mind. We are releasing our expectations in favor of accuracy. 

And accuracy has a way of clicking things right into place.

Sometimes: where there is a will, there is a way.

And sometimes, our will power has reached its limit - or at least its productive limit. 

Sometimes we try to will our way to a certain result on a certain timeline, only to destroy so much along the way. 

For what?

I don’t ask that rhetorically - it’s an actual question to ask if you find yourself struggling with a timeline-based reality. 

If you continue to try to will your way through, what is the best case scenario but also what is the worst? 

Conversely if you opted to embody a little more patience and grace, what might be possible?

I don’t know. Only you will see. But perhaps in the process of releasing your urgency, you might actually finally get the brownies you’ve been working for all this time.