This week several initiatives that I’m working on remain in limbo. Limbo is one of the hardest places to be – slow moving, circular and lacking in time pieces. To manage the impatience and the concomitant anxiety, I decided that the universe is telling me to wait, reminding me to practice the art and craft of patience.
Waiting takes patience, sucks it up like a vacuum cleaner until all that’s left is dry, desiccated and bare. I check my email, read news on my mobile, doom scroll through Instagram and Twitter, WhatsApp my sister in the States, tidy up the house, go over my children’s homework with them, check my email, call my mom, help my husband with a letter he’s writing, put clothes in the wash, sweep the dust from the floor in the living room, check my email, take the dog for a walk, go to work, come home from work, prepare dinner, read a book, write in my journal, check my email, get a haircut, buy new eye glasses, doomscroll, write a short story, go to work, come home from work, fix dinner, change the sheets on my bed, edit the short story, check my email, buy Vaseline for my chapped lips, walk through the bedroom, my hand lightly sweeping along the rough wood of the aging closet doors, doomscroll, check my email, go to work, read the newspaper, WhatsApp my husband, remember tree climbing in Amsterdam in the cool of a birch tree forest, go to work, come home from work, shower, take the dog for a walk, check my email…
Waiting weighs on you. It grounds you, grounds you into the floor where you stand, the chair where you sit, it blurs your vision and dulls your senses. It erodes your sense of time, collapsing it into a small disc you might drop into your pocket and then stretching it back out again, only in all directions at once, like one of those plastic rainbow circles used in kindergartens to teach children about cooperation.
Weight. We’ve been living with weight all our lives, worrying about it, obsessing over it, carrying it around on our thighs and our buttocks and in our heads. We measure and weigh, diet and wait impatiently for the pounds to drop, for the erosion of mass, for a slimmer, newer weight without so much bulk to it. We weigh our options. We weigh down the days so that the stay, rocks weighed against time passing.
Whether you wait or weigh, there is a penance to be paid. A toll that takes time as its fee. I’m no good at waiting, no good at weighing the choices before me.
So I practice patience the way you scribble lines before learning to draw, warming up for the lesson.
