Waiting on Line

Waiting for the water to boil, the light to change, the website to load. We are always anticipating, always teetering, never here. It makes me wonder what there is about “there” that makes it so captivating, so magnetic. It seems as if all this resistance to the present constitutes our primary posture in the world. It lurks, resistance does, underground in our original experience, as if hanging out in the birth canal had just flat-out tried our patience. And it doesn’t have to be waiting for a visit from a beloved friend or waiting for the pain to subside. It can be anything, the smallest thing. Waiting for the toast to pop. We are always looking for what comes next.

The natural surround doesn’t operate that way. Flowers don’t have fixed ideas about when to bloom. They open when conditions are right for them. We say “the tulips are early this year,” when in fact it’s not early according to the tulips.

I notice the first tinge on the maples and already I’m anticipating autumn instead of somehow making room for the liminal space between summer and fall. And even though I know at a deep level that my time here is collapsing in on itself, I continue to race past the present as if there’s a future I absolutely have to have right now. I will not wait on line another minute.

Reflecting on impatience has become my spiritual priority and my greatest interior challenge precisely because it is so ancient, so cellular. When Dr. Benjamin Spock published his bestseller Baby and Child Care in 1946, he sparked a revolution in the way parents, primarily mothers, interacted with infants. Prior to Spock, who advocated for a more loving, tender approach, experts - God knows there were always experts - advised mothers to feed their babies on a strict schedule, generally every four hours. If the baby woke up hungry or needed to be held after two and a half hours, too bad. She cried until the next scheduled feeding. There was a great fear of coddling or spoiling babies by comforting them. Where did this come from, this fear of love? How vast was the substrate that supported generations of ravenous babies? The federal government published a widely read pamphlet entitled Infant Care in 1929 that stated that “a baby should learn that habitual crying will only cause his parents to ignore him.” Imagine a pamphlet inducing a million nightmares. This was the pre-1946, pre-Spock, worldview. I was born in 1945. My belly was kept empty by a gentle, well-intentioned, woefully misinformed, middle-class family. Disinformation matters.

Now, I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want and, trust me, I do. But not without guilt and this is the magic of it. I have succeeded in making the maternal withholding my own, denying myself approval after inhaling a pizza while at the same time feeling the greasy, cheesy aftereffects. I’m having my cake and eating it too, the ultimate first world problem. There are millions of children going without dinner in Haiti and Guatemala, but waiting to be fed is no longer something I have to worry about. My life is so easy. It should be simple to negotiate. All I have to do is learn to tolerate the unknowable future, the waiting in traffic, and remain awake to the banquet of the miraculous present.

Like the children born during the pandemic, the covid babies, my parents were careful to protect me from contagion. They sent me to summer camp in the Poconos during polio season. But for us, the pre-Spock babies, the real threat was always the contagion of unregulated caring, the danger of damage from too much love, too much life. The very word “spoiling” suggested that the inner character of a child could somehow rot in the sunlight from asking for and receiving an excess of attention. So we made do. What choice did we have? We were expected to wait. To sit in our assigned seats, line up, raise our hands, say please and thank you. And waiting became our life’s work. Some people became experts, masters of delayed gratification. But I became one of those who suspected that there was more to life than waiting on line. I went looking for the now hiding in plain sight.

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My 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, is available directly from me, from Amazon or on order from your local bookseller.