Is It Patience or Something More?
- Michele Russel
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Reflections on Caregiving, Faith, and Daily Life with Jonny
People often tell me, “You must have so much patience.” It’s said with kindness and a kind of wonder, as if they’re imagining whether they could do it themselves. I appreciate that recognition. But how does it work? Where does it come from? It’s not the burden one might imagine.
Patience is part of it, but it’s just what’s seen on the surface of something deeper: an active, disciplined attention to each moment. It’s a daily commitment to keep moving, adjusting, and creating connection and meaning, even when things don’t go as planned.
Jonny’s Experience: Waiting, Gratitude, and Growth
Jonny talks about patience a lot too. As he has said, “I’ve had a lot of practice waiting and just being okay with ‘it’s coming soon.’” Waiting is frustrating, yet it can also be peaceful.
Jonny has to wait for things most people take for granted. He can’t just get up when he wants; he has to wait for someone to help him. He can’t decide he’s hungry and grab a snack, instead, he asks and waits for someone, usually me, to get it for him.
Packing for a trip, or preparing for one of our Adventure with Jonny outings, takes time, organization, and thought that Jonny isn’t able to do himself. So while I’m folding clothes, sorting papers, and checking flights, Jonny waits, usually lying in bed watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine or YouTube, half excited and half bored. He asks questions like, “When are we leaving?” or “Where are we stopping?” The waiting stretches on, but his interest and anticipation never fade.
My everyday routines of cleaning, cooking, helping him with therapy exercises, or to move around the house mean he must pause and wait. Even small things, like adjusting the temperature of the shower water, require him to communicate the ask (an effort that can be hard for him). Getting out the door, into the car, or adjusted in his wheelchair all take time.
Most of the time he meets these waits with grace, though sometimes not. And yet, he still notices the small gifts along the way: moments of care, comfort, connection, and the excitement of an adventure ahead. Patience, for him, is real. It’s not passive, it’s practiced. Sometimes challenging, sometimes quiet, sometimes ordinary, and sometimes profound. It shapes his days and allows him to participate in life, even when he cannot control the pace.
As Jonny has said, “Time is relentlessly persistent.” He’s learning to make peace with that persistence and to find a kind of calm inside the waiting.
Caregiving Beyond Patience: Faith, Flexibility, and Choice
For me, caregiving isn’t really about patience either. It’s about discipline, faith, flexibility, and choice. It’s getting up day after day and doing the same things again and again because they matter! It’s paying attention, adjusting the pace, shifting when needed, and finding ways to make ordinary moments meaningful and even fun.
It’s endurance, creativity, and love in action. Being flexible , open to change and willing to adjust when plans don’t go as expected keeps frustration down and makes space for joy and growth.
And choice is at the heart of it: I get to decide how to respond, how to move, how to engage in each moment. That freedom, even in the middle of limitation, allows flexibility and wonder to live alongside discipline and faith.
The Rhythm of Daily Life: Finding Grace in the Ordinary
There’s a rhythm to this life. It’s a kind of dance. We move together, learning each other’s pace, adjusting, trying, and finding joy in the repeating. Life slows down. Things take longer. Days flow differently. But if you stay steady and connected, you begin to notice growth. It’s quiet at first, sometimes hard to name, yet faith recognizes it.
What feels like waiting becomes something else entirely: gain, not loss. Something unseen taking root in the depth and quiet, a foundational gratitude that grows only from walking this road together.
Patience? Maybe. Something More? Definitely.
So yes, maybe patience is in there somewhere, but it’s not enough to describe what this life really is. It’s presence. It’s discipline. It’s flexibility. It’s choice. It’s faith in motion. It’s love lived out, day by day, moment by moment, step by step. It’s an adventure.
And I feel grateful. Because I get to do this. To move at this pace. To love this closely. To witness the hidden, sacred moments that most will never see.
Maybe it’s just grace experienced as the quiet motion of love through hard things. It’s what carries us through ordinary days, turns endurance into devotion, and transforms patience into presence. It’s what keeps us showing up, adjusting, creating, and believing.
It’s how we keep walking together through limits and surprises, through the ordinary and the sacred.
It’s how love lives: day by day, moment by moment, step by step.
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