Progress and Waiting.

I am renovating a room in my parent's home right now. The room in question was my room when I was very young, then became my sister's room for several years, then my room again after she moved out, and then while I was in college became a storage space slash office slash shrine to my geekiness. My star wars posters and glow-in-the-dark stars from a simpler time stayed on the walls for years.

When I moved back home after I finished college and took my vacation from maturity, one of the realizations I came to while I was working as a bartender was that I wanted to change that room. I knew it would eventually be my father's office again after I moved out and I didn't feel I was doing him a service by leaving him a teenager's room complete with faded images of Darth Vader and empty, dusty CD racks.

So I moved everything out of the room and set to it with hammer and crowbar. All the furniture in the room was built-in, so I ripped it all out. A dog fell through my ceiling back while I was in school (that's a whole separate story, coming soon), so there is all-new sheetrock in my room, but none of it was finished, so after all the furniture had been ripped out I mudded and sanded all the sheetrock, then textured and painted the ceiling and painted the walls.

We're putting cherry wainscoting and a chair rail all the way around the room, and now that the painting is completed, the major project has been preparing all the wood for the wainscoting, baseboard and chair rail. This meant staining it, restaining it, then coating it in polyeurathane, smoothing it down with steel wool and recoating it with polyeurathane again.

After each of those steps nearly a full day is required for the wood to dry. If you apply the next coat too early, you'll just waste your time (at best) or ruin the wood.

So I find myself thinking about progress. I find myself wondering how many times we try and force things to happen when we should realize we're in a 'drying phase'--where waiting is the only way to make sure things will go right. If we'd just be more patient would everything fall into place?