[image error]As I sit here while my computer goes through its mysterious ‘updates in progress … this may take a while’ process, I am set to thinking how we spend much of our lives just waiting – whether we want to or not.

The everyday waiting – for trains, planes, and automobiles; for doctors, dentists, and stop lights – are the obvious ones, the waiting has been scheduled into our day, we have allowed for it. Once we reach the airport or station or stop, we can see how long our wait will be. If we are organized, we plan for it, bringing along other jobs that have themselves been waiting to be taken care of – that book, checking of emails, the overdue call back, or even a longer task that needed just this enforced waiting time to be considered worthy of attention.

Then there is the unrealized waiting time; the waiting we do not appreciate or notice.

In the morning I wake and wait a while before rising; I wait for the kettle to boil and the toaster to pop. I wait for the car to heat and the garage door to close; I wait for the students to arrive, to settle, to respond, to work, to clear up, to leave. Times 5 per day

So while I always feel I am continuously rushing forward – busy, stressed, not enough time in the day – I’ve come to realize that much of the time when I am in the middle of ‘busy’, I am actually waiting, that there is a great deal of time just spent … waiting. It is the other side of the coin, another way to assess your life, how it is constructed on a daily, if not a monthly or yearly basis.

How often do we remark how fast each year flies by? But if we consider, within that flying year, there have been many, many periods of just waiting enveloped inside the overall rush of busy-ness, and therefore, many, many opportunities to enjoy the enforced stillness if we want to.

And now that we have once again – in what seems like no time at all – arrived at the crazy, busy holiday season, perhaps it would be better – rather than feeling stressed and out of control as we rush through work, through shops, through the season itself – to notice instead just how much time we spend waiting, and attempt some kind of acceptance of that inevitable waiting as our turkey cooks, or our plane flies, or the shopping line dawdles its way towards the registers. Perhaps if we can pay attention to the waiting, accept it as a small oasis of calm and reflection, we can take the stress out of the season and be better able to embrace it as we should.