I really do not like waiting. I will put something back on a shelf rather than wait in a long check-out line. I will shop online, choose a different restaurant, come back later, or change my plans altogether to avoid a line.

I hate waiting for a bus too. Why stand and wait when I can start walking now? Usually, the bus passes me as I am chugging along down the street. It does not phase me. At least I didn’t wait, I tell myself. A funny logic, I know.

I remember as a child waiting for special days, like birthdays and Christmas, and feeling as though time was moving as slow as molasses. As a teenager, I would count down days until I could visit out-of-town friends or go to summer camp: month after next, week after next, day after the day after tomorrow. It felt like time crawled until finally it was … today! And somehow, the long-awaited day had arrived.

I am waiting now like I have never waited in my life. Expecting the child that I have carried for the past nine months to come into the world, I cannot make this magical event happen on my timeline. I cannot just set off walking. I cannot make a different choice or come back later.

My spouse and I have waited, counting months and weeks and days, watching my body change, following our baby’s development step by step: organs and fingernails and eyelashes. We have moved from flutters to kicks to rolls, reveling in bulges that are feet and elbows, imagining what they might look like on the outside.

The leaves are changing here in New England and falling, one by one, covering the ground, shuffling under my feet as I walk, slowly now, talking to the baby: We are ready for you. Come ahead. The days grow shorter and the ground grows colder, prepping for dormancy, for a winter of waiting. Our waiting time is now. We wait for life to emerge.

Enjoy the wait, they say. While it’s still just the two of you. While you and baby are one. Pregnancy is to be savored, they say. Well, mine has been complicated, often hard to savor, and at this point I am rather uncomfortable. But there is wisdom in their words.

And so I am practicing something that does not come naturally: enjoying the wait. I am practicing savoring each day, each moment that my babe and I are joined in this most intimate way that will never be again. I am practicing breathing deeply, being present, watching the leaves fall, waiting for our lives to change irrevocably, for our hearts to be transformed in ways we cannot imagine. Waiting becomes the practice itself.

We are over a month from the beginning of Advent, yet I have never understood the season as well as I do now: patience and reflection. Calmly, quietly preparing body, heart, and soul for the miracle that will be.

It’s December 8 already; one third of the way through the Advent calendar that I still haven’t dug out of the basement closet and put up. We did manage to put up the tree, and even decorate it this year, Thanksgiving being so early and all. (Last year we opted for the naked look).

Noooooo, my soul moans, don’t let these precious days slide by unnoticed! I always have this fantasy of spending December sipping tea and sitting on the couch with loved ones, admiring the lights of the Christmas tree, maybe while listening to some of our favorite music. And it always turns out that I’m just proud to remember to water our tree as I run by.

I don’t know why it took me this long to realize it, but it’s suddenly become clear to me that if I am going to get any waiting done this month, I’m going to have to plan for it.

Time was, waiting just happened. When I was a kid, my sibs and I allocated the rotation of December days, jostling for which little cardboard doors of that sparkly advent calendar were ours to open. (Since we used the same advent calendar every year, some of the doors were torn off…so if you got those days assigned to you, you had to just pretend to open a door. Obviously none of us wanted those days.) Time was, perusing the Sears or Penney’s catalogue, both to make my list and then to fantasize about what Santa might bring me, took up a number of hours each week. Time was, the days leading up to Christmas felt like an enormous mountain to climb, and it seemed like we would never get there!

Now the days feel more like a landslide behind me which I am trying to outrun as I scoot down that mountain as fast as I can. Donnnn’tttt loookkkkk baaaacccckkkkkkkkkk!!!!!

So, it occurs to me belatedly, if I really want to do it, I need to put waiting on my calendar. Now for me, the word “waiting” and the word “impatient” seem to be grafted onto the same tree trunk. Often, when I am waiting, I am wishing away that time, not fully there at all. If I’m not crabby, it’s because I’m distracting myself, playing Scrabble on my iPhone in the long check out line, or talking on the phone while I sit outside my kid’s school. That’s not what I need to calendarize. I have plenty of that! There should be a different word for this intention to cultivate patient waiting.

Years ago, my office bought a new phone answering system, and for some reason the wait between punching in the extension you wanted and getting that person on the phone was insanely long. Probably two full minutes. No matter what kind of music we tried putting on it, people were inevitably crabby when they finally got to us. Finally, someone had the wise idea to change our answering machine. When you called, you got this message:

“After you push in your party’s extension, please enjoy an extended time of silence to meditate and pray.” And then, rather than playing music, it was completely quiet. After that, the voices that spoke from our answering machine ceased being frustrated and angry, and instead, greeted us with words like, “Wow! I’m going to start calling here every day just to enjoy that quiet!” or “I wish that had lasted a little longer!” (Someone from the Washington Post business section even got wind of it, and put a little blurb in about us entitled, “Just pray someone answers.”) It was all about creating space just for waiting.

For me, I think, that space is most accessible early in the morning, before anyone wants anything from me, and late at night, after anyone wants anything from me. It will be dark during both of those time periods. And the house will be quiet. But the trick is, I have to turn my mind toward intentionally waiting. Not making my day’s to do list in the morning or thinking with regret of everything I didn’t accomplish at night’s end. Just sitting in a place of anticipation, expectation, even longing.

My favorite line in a Christmas carol is “Let every heart prepare Him room.” That’s what I want to do during my daily times of waiting: prepare the room, just as I do when a guest I love is coming to stay with me. I clean, I put on fresh sheets and sometimes even put out fresh flowers. Which is to say that I won’t be tweeing, emailing, calling, texting, IMing, skyping, zooming, or otherwise pinging you during those times.

I want to be offline, but thoroughly plugged in. (I’ll let you know how it goes.)