I don’t usually enjoy waiting.
It’s not just that I lack patience (a character flaw I fess up to, and be glad you didn’t know me in my 20s). The politics of waiting pisses me off. In simple terms, the less important your value to society, the more you have to wait. Value is mainly economically defined, in the shortest and narrowest terms possible. Think separate security lines for first class passengers, inner-city emergency rooms, and bank windows just for business customers. (I’m pretty sure Claude Levi-Strass wrote a fantastic piece about power dynamics and waiting, but after spending half an hour trying to retrieve a fuzzy undergraduate memory, I figured how much longer could I make you wait to read this?)
That said, having grown up in New York City where you never know how long you’ll have to wait for the next train, or if you’ll be stuck on the supermarket line behind a coupon cutting granny, I’m an excellent waiter.
Even before the advent of cell phones and the internets, at any given time, I’ve always carried things in my bag to keep myself entertained and engaged — at the least something to read, plus a journal and pen.
Now I have a less literal bag of tricks that includes meditation, mudras and energy work that I can also do just about anywhere. (And I was reminded this morning watching Democracy Now of how these practices can also help us feel free anywhere, as I heard the story of a former prisoner who partially attributes surviving his 18 years inside (most of it on Death Row) to an intense daily meditation practice. Another great example is this one.)
I’ve written about learning to wait things out — like the flu and boredom. And if the weather is nice and I have my literal and figurative company of tricks with me, then hell, you could even blow me off.
Right now, I’ve been observing how I am sustaining and talking to myself during a holding pattern period. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, my insanely-sweet-and-hot (who is not younger than me, stop asking!) dude will move to the States. I haven’t had a roommate in something like 17 years so that will be adjustment enough, but then we’ll also get married within 90 days of his arrival, and presumably start working together on creating a wellness practice or center of sorts (maybe a practice here, a center in his home country of Peru?) The possibilities are endlessly fabulous. One week, I’m pointing out which locally sourced recycled wood furniture I’d like to have in our center. The next, I’m sending him a trailer of my favorite doctor in the whole wide world (next to JC of course) going to an area not too far from our place on the beach (love how that last phrase rolls off my keyboard) to study the affects of ayahuasca on addiction and adding more bullets onto our “things to do when JC and I go to Peru” list.
So change is in the air and I am super excited about it. But there’s that darn traffic control pattern, We need the go ahead from the US Citizenship & Immigration Services (and Homeland Security). We’ve been under “initial review” for just under three months now.
In the meantime, I find myself gently determining what I can absolutely commit to and what I can’t, just because I don’t know for sure that I can. For someone who enjoys planning, it’s an interesting practice in not planning.
As always, the path is be present with what’s in your life — even if there are things that are up in the air.
Would love to hear how you wait things out!
Love,
Yael
P.S. If you’re in DC, come to my newest yoga class Tuesdays from 6-7pm (or any others, in fact), or to one of my upcoming workshops (including Pen & Pose, Reiki 2 and Yin Yoga).
