What you do with time
is what a grandmother clock
does with it: strike twelve
and take its time doing it.
You’re the clock: time passes,
you remain. And wait.
(From: “Mother,” by Kurt Brown)
I’ve spent a lot of time waiting over the past few days. It began at six a.m. on Thursday morning, as I arrived at the San Diego airport to check in for my flight to Toronto. I waited in line for a boarding pass and to check my bag. I waited in line at the TSA security checkpoint. I waited in line to board the flight, and we all waited, an hour and forty minutes past our departure time, the result of the high winds that were pummeling Southern California. Hours later, arriving in Toronto, I waited in the long line of disembarking passengers to pass through customs. And by the time I finally claimed my bags and climbed into my son-in-law’s car an hour later than expected, we ran into the dinnertime traffic, extending our normal 25 minutes door to door to about an hour. My day, it seemed, had been defined by little more than waiting.
In truth, it’s not something I do well. Whether it’s a line at airport security, a doctor’s appointment, a tardy dinner guest, or finding myself still waiting, as I did in her adolescent years, for my daughter, whose perpetually last-minute style is even more pronounced as she juggles her preparation with that of her two-year old daughter’s. Despite helping out as much as I can, I seem to end up—you guessed it—sitting near the door and waiting to go somewhere we’ve planned.
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
(From “In the Waiting Room,” by Elizabeth Bishop)
Have you sometimes found yourself waiting for someone or something to happen? No doubt you have, because we’ve done some form of waiting for most of our lives. We’ve waited for a special event, for people, for letters to arrive, or our planes to depart. We’ve checked our watches when a guest hasn’t arrived at the appointed hour for a lunch or dinner and wondered if we got the date wrong. We wait in lines for tickets, for security checks, for advertised specials, or the hot new film that everyone is talking about. We’ve waited and paced the floor when a teenage child doesn’t arrive home at curfew. We’ve impatiently thumbed through outdated magazines in the doctor’s office as the hands on the clock move well past our scheduled appointment time. And it’s likely that you have waited, as so many of us have, trying not to worry, to hear the results of the battery of medical tests administered to you or a loved one. In short, we’ve all done a lot of waiting.
We’ve all waited with hope; and we’ve waited with dread. But sometimes, it’s the waiting that overtakes us, and we’re unable to concentrate on anything but the waiting for someone on something to happen.
Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting
And the letter you wait for won’t come,
And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray
And the letter I wait for won’t come.
(From “Caboose Thoughts,” by Carl Sandburg)
We know better, of course. It does no good to pace the hallway or sit at the table, foot tapping restlessly, willing something or someone to speed up. Time—and events—move as they will. If we allow impatience to be the master, then how much of life have we failed to notice?
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
(From “The Four Quartets,” by T.S. Eliot)
The faith and the love and the hope are … in the waiting. These words make me reconsider why life makes us wait. I am still learning, even after all these years, to accept what I cannot control, to let things unfold as they will, even if it’s as simple as waiting for my daughter finally come into the room and say, “I’m ready to go now.” and almost always, we manage to arrive wherever it is we’ve planned to go without too much delay.
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
(From: “You Reading This, Be Ready,” by William Stafford)
What do you wait for? Do you remember a particular time when your life seemed to be consumed by waiting? Were you waiting with hope, dread or impatience? Why? When has waiting kept you from noticing, from appreciating those small moments of beauty that Stafford describes? Write about waiting.
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