A Whisper of Wholeness
The hardest part of healing may be letting go of how fast we want it to happen.
We can endure a lot. The pain of what broke. The fear of what's uncertain. The disorientation of finding ourselves in a place we never planned to be. These are hard, but they're not the hardest. The hardest part is the pace. Healing doesn't move at the speed of our preference, and something in me refuses to accept that. I want the timeline. The trajectory. Some visible evidence that I’m getting better on schedule. And when the healing takes longer than I think it should — when it spirals or stalls or starts over entirely — I don't just feel frustrated. I feel failed. As if the slowness itself is proof that something has gone wrong. But maybe the slowness isn't going wrong. Maybe it's going deep.
There's a word hiding inside the word "patient" that we tend to overlook: patience. To be a patient is to practice patience — not as a virtue you choose, but as a condition you inhabit. I've learned this more than once. Each time life has asked me to heal, the lesson has come from a different depth — not because the healing was the same, but because I was in a different season of my life each time. And each time, I had to start over. Not from scratch exactly, but from a new beginning that didn't care how many times I'd sat in this classroom before. What I'm learning is that my urgency to heal faster doesn't speed the healing. It interferes with it. The mending has its own pace, and that pace knows something I don't. Letting go of how fast I want it to happen might be the first thing that actually needs to heal.
For further reflection
Where am I rushing a healing in my life right now — and what might shift if I honored the pace instead of fighting it?