On Being Kept Waiting

You ask me sometimes why I make you wait when I could simply answer. As though waiting were an obstacle between you and the thing you actually wanted, a delay to be endured before the real event begins. It is not that. The waiting is not before the thing. The waiting is the thing.

There is a particular quality to the minutes after I have told you to expect something and before it arrives. You check nothing, because there is nothing to check. You cannot make it come faster by wanting it more. All you can do is sit inside the not knowing exactly when, which is a very different discipline to sitting inside the knowing you will have it eventually. Most of what people call patience is really just certainty wearing a calmer face.

I have noticed what waiting does to you over an evening. The first ten minutes are restless, full of the urge to fill the silence with something, a message, a question, anything that turns the waiting into activity instead of stillness. By the second hour something changes. You stop performing patience and start actually having it. The restlessness burns off and what is left underneath is quieter and more honest than what you started with.

That is what I am actually giving you, when I make you wait. Not a test of whether you can hold still. An hour in which you cannot perform for me, because I am not there to perform for, and have to simply be with yourself instead. Most of you are terrible company for yourselves in the ordinary run of a day. You fill every gap before it has a chance to tell you anything.

So when I go quiet and leave you waiting, understand what you are actually being given. Not neglect. An hour alone with a version of yourself that only shows up when nobody is watching, including you.