How much time do you spend in waiting? I notice this in travel: getting there and returning -- those are days that are devoted to waiting. For the train to get to the airport, for the security check, for the passport control, for the gate to open and the boarding to begin. You get the picture. But in the everyday, isn't waiting unnecessary (especially if you no longer have to commute to work)?
Maybe. And yet...
I wake up and wait until something within me clicks and I deem myself ready to get up. Early usually, but still, there is that period of a delicious idleness.
Animals fed...
... I start in on breakfast preparation. This is tricky. Eat when it's ready? No, almost always I prefer to wait for Ed.
Most such waits are quiet times spent on reading all the stuff that comes my way -- some algorithm has figured out that I like paintings, especially by Monet and Van Gogh, that I love travel to France, Scotland and Italy, that poetry of the Mary Oliver/Robert Frost type always puts me in a good mood, and that delicious food is very satisfying to look at. My inbox and Facebook page are filled with this stuff and I dont think it's a waste of time to flip through these images, especially after I'm done reading the day's news. One needs something to balance the sad events that plague our planet.
[Somewhere at the bottom of the paper, I found an interview with Joan Baez. It's a great little piece! So much to admire there... You can read it here.]
Okay, sometimes the wait is just too long. Forget Ed, I'm eating alone today.
Which of course wakes him and in the end I get a groggy Ed at the table.
There is a picture book that (some of) the kids once liked called Waiting. A child has an awful lot of waiting in her life. Waiting for parents to stop talking to a friend they ran into on the way to the park. Waiting for the school day to end. Waiting in line for everything! In this book, figurines and toys wait on the windowsill. For seasons to change. Perhaps that touches a chord in all of us as we anticipate all the good that will come at a later date -- the rebirth, the growth, peace, happiness -- all those elusive fundamentals of a good life.
In the meantime, we wait for the little things. For motivation to vacuum up the house, clear out the porch and -- this is the good part -- to go biking with Ed on what has to be the most gorgeous November day ever. The wait is short: motivation is not hard to come by on days like this one.
Later, I wait in front of the school building -- half an hour each and every day, reading my book, but really waiting... for the kids to come out (or one kid on Mondays).
Farmhouse time!
And I think how most people dont really wait anymore. The smart phones are out, the brain is racing to catch up with email, or to read the latest newsfeed, or message someone who is, in turn, waiting to hear from you. Despite the grumbling out there on device overuse, I cant say that this kind of filler in periods of waiting is necessarily a bad thing. There are efficiencies to waiting productively. Nevertheless, once you pass 70, I think you especially love the idea of waiting without the clutter of external stimuli. I at least love combining waiting with watching: people around me, engaged in their lives, birds chasing each other over crab apples, maybe nothing more than snowflakes falling, or sunlight filtering through the last of the maple leaves. You know at some point you'll have to move on to your next task and the one after. But for a few brief minutes, or maybe longer, you pause with everything and just wait, deliciously loving the life that unfolds before you.
