I.68 — Waiting

The day hands you sits you did not ask for. The queue. The delayed train. The hold music. The minutes outside a room where something is being decided.

Most people spend these clenched — on the delay, on the small injustice of having to stand still, on whatever is in the pocket. Watch a queue and you will see a row of closed hands.

These are gifts, badly wrapped. Every involuntary wait is a place the practice can go without being scheduled. Find the breath. Feel the feet. Let the waiting be what it is, a stretch of unfilled time, rather than a wrong being done to you. The wait is not shorter. But you are in it rather than braced against it, and being in something is the whole difference.

Test it in the next one. Do not reach for anything to fill it. Stand there, open-handed, for as long as it lasts, and see whether the minutes are worse or better than the ones spent clenched. This is one of the few tests in this book that life will set for you daily without being asked.