Patience

How I unlearned the word of my year

We’ve all heard the sayings:

“Patience is a virtue.” Or my favorite, “Patience, young Padawan.”

But what is patience? I thought I knew when I picked it.

Some number of years ago, let’s say 4, I decided to choose a word for each year (shoutout to Tanya Monsef—thank you for the inspo).

2026: Patience.

I chose this word because in 2024 and 2025 many things in my life sort of fell apart. A relationship ended, and I left London for Central America. Within a couple weeks of starting my new life in Mexico, my boss at the time told me that we wouldn’t be getting any new clients, and our rates were getting cut.

A couple months later, while in Guatemala, I sent my resignation letter into what appeared to be a failing company. It was a sad time. My income dropped from about 8,000 a month to about 750 a month. Hm.

Paradoxically, around the same time, I led my first international retreat, flying a private client down to Guatemala for a medicine journey. I was living at Fungi Academy, surrounded by soul fam, making a new home. But, despite it all, I was out of cash, and not sure what to do with myself.

Guate

So, like many mid-20s who find themselves in a pinch, I called my family and asked if I could move home. I’m a lucky one. I had family to call. And they said yes. So, almost exactly a year ago, I flew to Sarasota, watching the volcanoes of Central America float away in the window.

On the plane, I wrote: “What next? Maybe the answer is to not rush into anything... To just let myself land and be present, and let life unfold before me, rather than trying to control my future.”

What followed were a couple thousand words of me desperately trying control my future. Welp. I kind of got there.

Fast forward a bit. It’s fall. I’m applying for my first ever full-time job. My would-be boss essentially says to me, ‘I need to know you’ll be here for a while.’

My boss is a brilliant woman who has worked as a psychologist for a long time. I imagine she knew a few things about me that I didn’t know about myself.

When she said that, I felt afraid. She was asking me to stay put, to commit to myself, to her and her team, and to the work here in this role. For as long as I’d been in control of my life, when the going got tough, I got going. I didn’t always know I was doing it, but I was.

Looking back, it’s a natural part of growing up in two households—for me, there was always another home to go to, always an escape.

As an adult, it was the same thing. Travel, while full of beautiful adventures, was a way of maintaining my own ungroundedness. Why? Because once a person becomes still, everything they’ve been running from catches up.

Hm.

When my now boss invited me to commit to being still for at least a couple years, I was faced with all this internal resistance. Living in the Berkshires meant letting go of any fantasy of getting back with my ex, or moving back to London. It meant forgoing the trips and festivals I watched my friends doing through social media. And most deeply, it meant confronting myself and not running away from what I found inside.

I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it.

Honestly, sometimes I’m still not sure.

But this morning, in the midst of some inner emotional turmoil, I drove to a walk I often take with my dad near my apartment. I crossed the barrier of the forest, into groves of ancient trees, deep green ferns still pressed to the earth by newly melted snow, and out again onto still brown fields.

There, before me, was an oak tree, splayed across the horizon, branches reaching and trunk strong. The morning sun filtered above the canopy to touch the oak with a gentle orange glow.

The old oak drew me in, and I found myself nestled into its roots, leaning against its soft-hard body. In the near-silence of the morning, tears dripped down my face.

To be still.

The wind playfully blew brown leaves across the field. The cold air, fresh in my lungs.

I didn’t know where the tears came from.

Patience.

As I crossed the boundary from 2025 into 2026, I knew I would need to learn it. But I didn’t really know what it was. I knew I would need to slow down, to learn to be still with myself, to wait, to stop rushing around.

It’s been an initiation.

Today, while steeping in a David Whyte book, I wrote:

Patience

My word of the year.

I’m learning that it doesn’t mean waiting for the future thing I want to become real.

It means learning that the present moment is real. It means obtaining the humility to belong here.

There is no magical future that patience leads to.

There is no “perfect,” which patience makes.

Other than the perfection that is here
When I am not barreling toward
An unknowable and unmeetable
Future

This is it.
Now.

Patience is accepting that.

Patience is being here.

Patience does not mean “the future is better than now,” but rather is a way of being in the difficult present without fleeing from it into the future.

When I chose patience as my word, I imagined that it would be the vessel that would deliver me into the future I’ve so deeply fantasized about, that it would bring me my soulmate or give me an abundant career. I imagined that patience would give me those things, but I also associated patience with a never-coming future.

Last night, I wrote in my journal, “Patience. I could pick a new word—‘all I could ever dream of comes to me now.’” It occurred to me that I was foreclosing my full experience of the present as a gift by always thinking that the future would be better, and that I needed to wait for it to come.

But, really that’s not how it works.

I remember a poem I recorded while walking El Camino

Every passing car asks me
What is your pride worth to you? 
Why won't you ask for help? 
What are you trying to prove? 
What is the difference between insecurity and ambition? 
What does it mean to be competitive? 
Why are you doing this to yourself? 
What is this pain for? 
Where are you going? 
What does your heart want? 
Each passing car,
I think of these questions again,
And I don't have the answers. 
And so I walk, 
and I walk, 
and I walk, 
and I walk.

On that same day, I made this little video.

A lot of wisdom in there.

What if patience actually allows us to look around and see the world as it is, not as we wish it would be? What if in that, there’s an opportunity to actually receive the always-present and abundant beauty?

Patience is perfect. Because this moment, if allowed to be, is perfect. Because it’s all there is.

And could I, could we all, ‘have faith that we’ll get there when we’re meant to.”

---

I sit here now in my first solo-apartment filled with plants, partially completed paintings, and playfully burning candles. Piano music cascades over me. The wind crackles the walls. And, I am safe.

There will always be an infinite amount of fantasies that my mind can lock onto as superior to this finite moment, this ordinary now. There will always be ways to escape, whether into the outer world or the inner one. There will always be ways out.

But there is only one way in.

And I think, it’s patience.

The capacity to be here.

In the present.

As it is.

Humbly,
Faolan