Pouring from the bottle.

Did you ever watch someone pour water from a bigger bottle into a smaller one? Did you feel nervous for them, or did you not care at all?

If you haven’t, next time try to notice the way they pour. You’ll see two things happening. Either a calm one or a messy one. The one who is messy will have the mindset that “I can wipe it all anyway.” On the other hand, the calm one will go with “If I stay calm enough, I won’t have to work or worry more.”

From all that, you’re going to figure out which one is you. And that’s going to be your gain.

I’m generally the calm pourer. I focus on steady pouring. It requires a little more time, but it’s worth it. And did I learn it overnight? Not at all. This calm pourer was once a messy pourer, too. I, too, used to focus on getting over with everything as fast as I could. But later on, cleaning the mess I made was harder than I thought. Because not every mess looks as easy to clean up as it seems. I needed time to learn about taking time. Learning patience needed patience too. If anger can multiply by time, why can’t patience too? If workloads can grow over time, why not healing too?

We have this concept of thinking that negative things grow over time, but positive ones don’t. Because we don’t even see positivity as something that’s worth focusing on. But if a negative thing can grow bigger, so can a positive side, too. The only difference is that it needs time. And we dismiss that too often.

So if there are moments in your life where you feel like pouring everything quickly and getting over it, slow down just a bit. Allow yourself to make a little less mess, even though it’s going to be a mess, it’s still going to be a little less, and that’s how you’ll figure out how you took your sweet time to learn about taking time until one day you’ll see you barely spilled anything on your table.