Ways to Wait
It’s easy to get impatient when waiting for something exciting. Whether it’s waiting just a few minutes for school to end, waiting till dinner for your favorite meal, or waiting several days, weeks or even months for a special event, trip or holiday, it can be hard not to get impatient. (“Only 287 days till my birthday!” Sound familiar?)
When we’re impatient, our bodies and feelings might give us some clues. Some people notice they are breathing faster. Maybe you find your hands are balled up into fists, or you are using your pen to drum on the table. Maybe you can’t stop bouncing up and down on the balls of your feet or walking around the room. You might feel like you are in a big hurry, or get nervous.
These are all normal when we are waiting for something exciting or important, and sometimes waiting can be fun. But sometimes, we also wait for hard things, like news from a doctor or veterinarian about a loved one or pet who’s sick. And sometimes, we want to just relax!
Patience is kind of like a muscle, and we have to exercise it in order for waiting to be something we are good at doing. If you are feeling anxious about waiting or impatient, or if you want to practice for the next time you need to wait for something, here are eight tools you can practice and take with you for when waiting gets difficult.
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Look up at the sky and imagine shapes in the clouds.
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Smile at a friend or family member, or go and talk to them while you wait.
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Count the number of freckles on your arm, leaves on the ground, change in your pocket . . . count whatever you like! It keeps your mind busy. You could also name (out loud or in your head) as many details of what you see in front of you, or the names of all the United States presidents that you know. What’s important is that you are giving your brain something different to think about.
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Sing a song (out loud or in your head)
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Making up a story, either by yourself or with friends.
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Take ten slow easy breaths. For every breath, think of something you are grateful for.
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Remember a favorite memory, and try to picture it in your head like a snapshot. What are all the details of the image?
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Remember your five senses. What can you see and hear? Where are you standing or sitting? Feel the seat or ground below you, or touch what’s nearby is (if it’s safe to do so). Take a deep breath and stick out your tongue. Are there any smells or tastes where you are?
(These suggestions, adapted from A Fine Parent blog, are useful for folks of all ages who’d like to exercise their patience muscles. )
Meditation is another tool that can help us handle those in-between times when waiting is hard. And children as well as adults can benefit from this practice. Through meditation, kids as well as adults can better focus and be present in their lives, which can sometimes make waiting easier.
Waiting is Not Easy!
Here is another story for the season, one that is very much about waiting. This is the story of a special child. Like every child, his parents waited eagerly for his birth. More than 2,000 years later, Christians as well as many Unitarian Universalists celebrate this birth at Christmas.
Longing for the Weeds
Hard to believe we’re turning towards April in Minnesota, where I live. Out my window, I only see snow and dead leaves on the plants still standing from last year’s garden.
I pawed through the snow this morning to see if I might find anything living at all—often the first thing I find is an aggressive weed called Creeping Charlie. In the summer, I am all about pulling up Creeping Charlie and removing it as much as I can. In the spring, though, I greet it as one would the bloom of a precious orchid. I squeal, my eyes sometimes tear up, I then pull off a piece, lift it up to my face, and sniff. AAAAH, I say out loud, standing on my sidewalk, and I wave it in the face of friend, family or stranger who happen to be near.
Some plants have pungent smells: Herbs, or geraniums, or roses. Creeping Charlie in spring smells just like life. Even as I write about it, I feel myself yearning to see it, to smell it, to touch it. Knowing that by July it will, once again, be just an annoying weed, taking up space where I want something beautiful to flower.
It’s been a long and cold winter here in Minnesota, and in many parts of the country—I’m just back from Boston, where I had hoped to see a few yellow daffodils blooming and instead saw white (and grungy) snow. I got out of town this winter, and headed to warmer climates as much as I could, but not long enough to keep me from getting a little edgy, irritable, surly even.
So, along about now, many of us start threatening to get out of Dodge, to live someplace that doesn’t make us so cranky. This time, perhaps, I am serious…but then I start remembering all the reasons I truly love it here. And I paw through the snow a little more.
All of this is to say, today is the day that I’ll plant my seedlings in the basement under grow lights. In the tiny section of the world I can control, I’ll begin greening up the world a bit, going down each morning to see my new babies poke their little heads up from the dirt, begin to get the shape of the leaves they will eventually become.
I think there’s a reason that seeds are such a universal symbol of hope. Every religion uses the metaphor of the seed to talk about possibility, growth, potential. In the seeds I plant today is my hope, and my affirmation, that once again, the snow will melt, the flowers will bloom, the herbs will be delicious, the roses will sweeten the air. But before that, blessed be the Creeping Charlie…
Impatiently Waiting to Patiently Wait
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.)
A Wild Patience
Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
A wild patience has taken me this far/as if I had to bring to shore/a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor/old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books/tossed in the prow/some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades. -Adrienne Rich, Integrity
Patience is a spiritual virtue worth cultivating, and yet it is something in short supply in my life right now. Last night’s news from my former home state of North Carolina is just the latest in a long string of insults to all people who believe that love is love. And as a gay man of faith, a part of my heart is torn out every time another vote is taken to declare my love to be inferior.
It’s hard to muster patience when your civil rights—or the rights of those you love and care about—are on the line. It’s hard to muster patience when the list of states banning same-sex marriage in their constitutions steadily grows and grows. It’s hard to muster patience when lawmakers fail again and again to have the courage to pass even simple legislation to, for example, ensure workplace non-discrimination for LGBT people.
It’s hard to keep repeating to myself Theodore Parker’s assertion from so long ago that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” That quote has long been a mantra of mine and yet with every passing election, with every legislative session, with every disappointing vote, it becomes harder to say, harder to believe, harder to force myself to think about.
And yet with every vote, it becomes more important to say. It becomes more important to remind myself of the truth in that statement. It is as if I am breathing necessary oxygen on the ember of hope that burns within me, keeping it glowing so that it might one day become a flame. And so, I practice patience.
And then today, our President announced that his “evolving” views on same-sex marriage had evolved some more. Did I hear this correctly? The President of the United States contradicted 61% of the voters in an important swing state? Maybe that moral arc of the universe will bend towards justice after all.
And so it is that I realize that what needs to be cultivated is not mere patience, but a wild patience.
A wild patience that knows when it’s time to wait, and when it’s time to act. A wild patience that sits sometimes, spreading healing balm on burned skin, and gets up sometimes to build, to work, to do. A wild patience that knows the difference between faith and resignation, that keeps the ember glowing amidst the howling storm, that steers the boat toward the shores of tomorrow.
Yes, hope is here. Love and justice are coming. Their arrival requires patience. Their arrival requires waiting, and breathing, and letting things go. And it also requires hard work.
May we find in ourselves both the patience to wait and the impatience to do what must be done. This year, let us be wildly patient together.