Time and Patience Will Take a Snail to Jerusalem

Patience, purpose, and only understanding the journey once you have already lived it

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“Time and patience will take a snail to Jerusalem,” so used to say my Murphy grandmother. Although in my part of Ireland we’d never have called her that, we called her nanny, which sounds posh, as if we had a ditzy Jewish New Yorker looking after us, but that wasn’t the case.

The woman behind the saying

Her name was Margaret, but everyone called her Peggy. She was brought up by her aunt and uncle because she was born before her parents were married and, oh, sure, the scandal that would have aroused meant she was shipped off — well, not really shipped off; her aunt and uncle lived at the end of the road.

Still, yeah, the wee babby-child (That’s Wexford talk for baby) was turfed out because her folks weren’t married when she arrived. Oh Catholic Ireland, the shame, the shame.

***Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.***

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But that’s a detour, although I’ll say that I miss her still; she died a good while ago now. Every now and then my auld lad will say something like, “By Jaysus, Peggy Murphy will never be dead while you’re alive.”

I think it’s meant as a compliment, but it’s one of those rural Irish compliments that has a healthy dose of passive aggressiveness to it, but y’know, I’d be awfully like her character-wise and sure she practically raised me when my auld pair were working. My Mam used to say it was a nightmare to get me home for bedtime because I loved being with her so much.

Anyway, I saw someone posting the above saying the other day, and it reminded me of her, and it got me a-thinking.

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How long would a snail take to reach Jerusalem?

First up, how long would it take a snail to get to Jerusalem from rural Wexford?

He’d need to get on a boat. Oh sorry, did I just assume the gender of a snail? I didn’t mean to; snails are mostly hermaphrodites, of course, land snails that is, and their mating is weird. Despite being hermaphrodites, they’ll mate with another snail, swap some love juice, and both will lay eggs.

Weird? Yes. Sexy? Also yes.

Anyway, a snail moves at around 0.05 km/h; for you Yankee Doodles, that’s 0.03 miles per hour. So, there are two possible routes from rural Wexford to Israel for our wee snail mate; let’s call it Sam, since we’ve established Sam is a hermaphrodite. Sam works as short for Samuel and Samantha... Sam, in both cases, crawls for 12 hours and rests for 12 hours.

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Sam’s two roads to Jerusalem

Sam gets a boat to France and hauls itself into Belgium, goes south-easterly through Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, into Serbia, then south through Bulgaria, Turkiye, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and then Israel, taking around 25 years.

Or, Sam has a generous benefactor who hires a fancy sailboat, and it goes from Wexford harbor to Ashdod harbor, and it would take 157 days, just over five months, 10 days of which were onboard our fine boat.

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The life lived along the way

Imagine both versions of Sam, and the adventures it’s just had on both odysseys. What Sam has seen, what Sam has experienced, the loves, the losses, the lusts, the rages, the wonder, the beauty, the melancholy, the whole feckin’ lot.

And when you’re in the middle of things, you’re experiencing them, but you’re not really appreciating them, are you? Not until later anyway, although maybe just humans are cursed with that; maybe there are no such problems amongst the animals we share the world with.

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The long road to here

When I started taking this type of writing seriously, I’d no clue what I was going to do. All I had was the massive ego of someone who’d been through the wringer, had some bizarre spiritual experiences, psychological realizations, and decided he wanted to help others who were stuck and fed up, lost and aimless — what I had been for so long and for so many years.

Now it’s many years later, and I’ve published a book, had articles read by north of a million people, connected with 1000s upon 1000s of people across the world, made loads of new friends — a few enemies too, I’d have to admit — but I still have loads to do.

Or do I?

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The ego trap of doing more

Because there’s kind of an ego trap there, isn’t there?

The need to do more, to show your worth by trying to eke out a place for yourself, have some influence, some — muah, ha-ha-haaaa — power and to see the results in the gratification machine that is the dopamine-doling-out drudgery of social media.

For years I’d felt stuck. I’d done my journalism degree, but couldn’t get a proper job other than freelancing, so I got into editing/proofreading and copywriting. They’re all fine jobs, but there’s no creativity in them.

Even copywriting, you’d think, would have it, but look, one of the worst — not worst, stupidest — copywriting jobs I had was reviewing venues in Australian cities.

There I was writing about the best hotels to have conferences in, the best pubs to have 21st birthday parties in, the best restaurants to have babyshowers in somewhere around Sydney Harbor, or the South Bank in Brisbane, or Perth’s CBD from my apartment in Katowice in southern Poland and, honestly ta Jaysus lads, I’d stuggle to find any of those cities on a blank map of Australia.

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Time and patience

But here I am now, and it’s years later, and time and patience will take a snail to Jerusalem.

I studied to be a counselor; I’m writing about the things that make my heart and my head happy: the big bad questions of philosophy, spirituality, and the mad world we find ourselves part of.

Looking back now, I can see how the dots all match up and connect, but when I was living them, I wasn’t sure which way anything would go, despite having a goal.

So, that’s all you can do, isn’t it?

Have your goal, or goals, know where you’re going, but put trust in the wind that it’ll blow and fill your sails. Because you can’t control, well, anything really, other than your reactions, and even then that’s kind of up for debate, but you can’t control outside circumstances for sure; all you can do is pick your goal(s) and head in that direction armed with patience and determination.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. **Learn more about me here. Social media links here.**

Donations link: **https://ko-fi.com/murfowski**