The Waiting

“Wait on the Lord, Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine Heart, wait I say on the Lord.”  So reads verse 14 of Psalm 27, which Mary Rowlandson, in the narrative of her captivity by Wampanoag Indians during King Philip’s War, offers to her fellow captive, the distraught goodwife Joslin.  Mistress Joslin, pregnant and about to deliver at any moment, carrying a two-year-old in her arms, 30 miles from the nearest white settlement, and beset, Rowlandson says, by “much grief upon her spirit, about her miserable condition,”  has found it “in her heart to run away.”

Unable, however, to muster the sufficient courage and strength of heart the psalmist recommends, she vexes her captors continually with pleas for release, until finally losing patience, they “gathered a great company together about her, and stripped her naked, and set her in the midst of them; and when they had sung and danced about her (in their hellish manner) as long as they pleased,” they tomahawk both mother and child and burn their bodies.  And though Mistress Joslin “did not shed one tear, but prayed all the while,” Rowlandson’s tacit message is clear enough: she should have waited.

By and large, we are all goodwife Joslins.  We hate to wait.  We hate waiting for online order to be shipped; we hate waiting for an apology; we hate waiting in traffic, in doctors’ offices, in airport security, in lines.  We hate waiting for water to boil, for winter to slipstream into spring, for morning to appear or for evening to fall, for people to get ready, for our cell phones to charge, for a rebirth of wonder, for red lights to turn green, for a restaurant meal to arrive, for the restaurant meal’s bill to arrive, for things to fall into place, for the time to be right, for a return text, for the microwave’s digital blink to reach zero, for what comes next, for our turn, for what lies in wait, for the cable guy to show up, for grief to end and hearts to mend.  We are exhorted to be in motion, always moving, always striving, and always with a purpose and a goal.  “The world is all gates, all opportunities,” Emerson tells us, and they are the proper waiters, “waiting to be struck” by us.  “Things may come to those who wait,” Lincoln says, “but only the things left by those who hustle.”  “I am to wait,” Shakespeare says in Sonnet 58, “though waiting so be hell.”

There are exceptions, of course.  We willingly wait, in long lines, in sometimes inclement conditions, to apply for jobs, to purchase tickets guaranteeing good seats at concerts and sporting events, to be among the first to burst through a store’s Black Friday doors.  But generally speaking, we hate to wait.  Our animal spirits are restless; they have legs built for racing. We want to be on about it, right now, this minute, this second, even if we have nothing more compelling, more important, to be on about.  We chafe at the order of things unfolding in due time, in a while, even, sometimes, in a moment.  We want things no more than a nanosecond from gratification, even though we teach our children that delayed gratification, a form of waiting, is a sign of mature adult behavior.  Our inner child, it seems, will not be placated.  It tantrums and sometimes turns belligerent.  We seek the immediate satisfaction of displacement from the dilatory and dillydallying.  Our tolerance for the dawdling fits in a demitasse cup with room left over for a bowling ball.  Our restive rhythm finds a processional pace unendurably pent, cloistered. We want nothing less than to be whisked, frictionless, though any delay obstructing our must-be-on-the-move sensibility.  We cannot achieve escape velocity fast enough.

Most of the time—for I, too, struggle, sometimes unsuccessfully, to repress my Joslined impatience—I actually do not mind waiting.  I attempt to focus my attention, to align the force of my senses and imagination, on the who and what around me.  I like to observe people and imagine their lives, the rage for order that infuses them, the rumors of sublimity that elevate them, the concepts that animate them, their geometry and texture and smoldering intensities.  I note the way they sit or stand, the magazines they pick up and the way they flip through them, the speed with which they scroll through their smart phones.  I listen to mothers comfort children or wives fidgety husbands.

Or I interrogate the point-of-purchase items surrounding me: Why is a candy bar consisting of peanuts, peanut butter, and caramel called “Payday”?  Did Mr. Wrigley actually chew gum?  Why on earth would anyone buy a pack of eight Bic disposable lighters? What are the cultural implications of two solid rows of breath fresheners?  I look at the headlines of tabloids and, discounting Jimmy Hoffa’s abduction by aliens or the newly discovered predictions of Edward Cayce or the latest scenario of the soon-to-arrive apocalypse, remind myself that the celebrity-culture scandals and breakups and embarrassments their headlines shout with such ill-disguised glee are actually happening to actual people who are experiencing actual emotional repercussions.

And I am an unabashed eavesdropper.  “Are you going to college,” I heard a young man behind me in a checkout line ask another.  “No,” he replied, “what’s the point?  And I like detailing cars.”  In a convenience store I heard a small boy ask his dad if he was mad and got this reply: “Am I mad that your Aunt Carla’s junk-ass dog peed on the living room carpet?  Yeah, I’m a little mad.”  Loitering in a snack food aisle I listened to a twenty-something woman hold forth about the epicurean delights of Jolly Time Crispy White Healthy Pop popcorn.  On a return flight from a conference I heard a man across the aisle telling his seatmate that his paper on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho had “killed.”  At a restaurant a young teen told his laughing friends, “And she was all heaving breast and hyperventilation.”  Small snatches of conversation, surely, but no less significant for that: embedded in a plot and expanded, they could form the stuff of novels.  “A lifetime,” T. S. Eliot reminds us, is “burning in every moment.”

We take waiting to be passive, to be controlled by circumstances, to be an absence of action, but even minimally it can be doing something, if only creating a for-the-nonce queue comraderie with a linemate, or, under more trying circumstances, if only practicing patience and good humor.  More powerfully still, it can provide an oasis for reflection, imagination, and deliberation amid the caravanned trade routes our bustling lives all too often follow.  We need not always be “in such desperate haste,” Thoreau asserts; we need not let “every nutshell and mosquito’s wing” derail us. 

The concluding line of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” resounds with inspiration: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  But why, I wonder, is seeking and finding and fixity of purpose associated with striving only, with huffing our lives down to the filter?  Cannot the wait, the cessation of motion, be just as active, intentional, and revelatory?  Can we not settle on settling in?  Can we refuse to settle for discontent, frustration, and boredom and, instead, settle up to the moment, invite it to linger, attend it, wring from it what it has to offer, and then be on our way?