We are all so impatient. We want everything and we want it now! We want happiness, fulfilment and life. It is normal to want such things. But we have to learn to respect the rhythm of our being. Look at the plants and animals, look at the vegetables and the fruit trees. It takes time to grow and to bear fruit. There are the summers of rich harvests, the autumns with rain and falling leaves, the grey and cold winters where life seems to have stopped and then there are springtimes when life is reborn.
It is the same with human life. We are like the fruit trees. We have been planted in the earth of our mother's being and we have grown. We are born, we developed in the sometimes rugged earth of our families. During our life, just as in the cycle of nature, seasons follow one another.
-Jean Vanier, Seeing Beyond Depression, p 41
