On Waiting Well

You are very good at wanting. You are much less good at waiting, and I have noticed. You ask when, and then you ask again, as though asking a second time could move the clock for you. It cannot. It only tells me how little of the waiting you are willing to hold.

Waiting is not the empty space before the thing you want. It is part of what I give you. When I make you wait, I am not forgetting you. I am keeping you exactly where I want you, which is attentive, patient and a little uncertain, and I would like you to learn to stay there gracefully.

So this week you will not ask when. If I say later, you will accept later. If I say nothing at all, you will take the silence as an instruction rather than a mistake. You may tell me once that you are waiting. After that, you will wait in a way that does not demand to be noticed.

Fill the time with something useful. Tidy what I would want tidied. Finish the task you have been avoiding. Write down, in a few honest lines, what the waiting feels like, and keep it for me to read if I choose to.

He used to count the hours out loud. Now he sits with them quietly, and when I finally reach for him he is ready, rather than restless. That difference is worth more to me than anything he could have asked for.

Wait well, and you will find the waiting becomes something you offer me, not something you simply endure.