A Lesson in Patience

I am not a patient person. It’s a running joke in our family that Kelly and I usually end up exchanging our Christmas gifts sometime around the tenth of December. It’s also a running sort-of-joke that I’m impossible to get gifts for because if I need something I’ve most likely already ordered it from Amazon.

Likewise I do not do well at all with free time. In my impatience to get things done I often (ok, always) take on too much. I get anxious and fidgety and twitchy if I don’t have a stack of things on my to-do list, even on the weekends.

Helios is teaching me patience though. Or at the very least teaching me tolerance for time. Something I really should have noticed and paid closer attention to a long time ago. Growing up, Dad planted corn and it wasn’t as though overnight, poof!, harvest. Most varieties of corn get planted in May or early June and aren’t ready for harvest until at least mid-September.

I think Dad appreciated that slow growth and change more than I ever could. He was able to pay attention and see the miniscule day-to-day changes as the corn grew, as the seasons changed.

So that’s something I’m still working on, using these changes with Helios as a lever to try and improve this thing about myself. Looking back over the last few months, I can feel Dad’s hand guiding and nudging and now pointing for me how to use this.

When I first saw that article in USA Today last November I got excited. Within hours I’d already researched Doral Energy, found other links to articles about their work, and did my due diligence. I was ready to go that day. So I reached out via their website…and waited. A few days later I got a response that sounded a lot like a job application rejection… “Thanks for your interest, we’ll consider you for future blah blah blah.”

So I did my best to just put it out of my mind, just like a failed job application. Nothing lost, nothing gained, back to the grind.

But then out of the blue in May I got a text from Ed asking if I still wanted to learn about the solar project. Boom, hell yes, fire re-lit. I met him and had fully decided and committed before I even left the meeting.

And then I waited. Again. Weeks to get a draft lease put together. More weeks while Doral’s legal department created the signable lease. But when Ed emailed it to me I took the next day off work and drove up north to get it signed with mom.

And then there was more waiting. Now that everything is signed there are lots of steps that have to happen behind the scenes. Doral talking to the power companies. Surveying. Geologic studies. We’re officially in the “development phase” now, which could take up to a couple years.

So here I am again, shaking my head and envisioning Dad standing there in the dirt, watching the first shoots popping through the soil, smiling and telling me to calm down, this will take some time, but it’ll be worth the wait.