Waiting

Every year I indulge in my favorite, personal Christmas tradition of trying to find or figure out what my presents are before Christmas day.  As a child I was often happily successful but now that I no longer live at home, it's nearly impossible to pull this off.  Instead, I upgraded my tradition to impassioned attempts to convince my mother that it's customary to open a present on christmas eve.  When this inevitably fails I resort to a gleeful re-enactment of my childhood waking-of-the-family-before-dawn ritual.  Mostly it's me exclaiming 'PRESENT TIME!!!!!' and jumping on the beds of sleeping people.
I'm grown. I *could* simply turn the excitement off.  That's what us grown people do.  Except so much of the joy and magic of this entire holiday season is made of anticipation.

An exquisite, collective waiting.

We wait for Santa, presents, warmer weather, snow to come, snow to melt, family to come, family to leave,  Christ's birth, the birth of a new sun.  We watch the light steadily succumb and in enveloping darkness we are left alone with our waiting.

I am inundated with pressure to create, make things happen, act, do, manifest.  But once you have collected all your faculties and applied them generously and thoroughly to a goal, there is always a waiting.  Whether you surrender to Time or not, it will have it's way.  So much agony settles into our sinew from the strain of resisting our portion of waiting.  So much of what we want, what we work for, what we invest ourselves in all have a price in the form of time.  Their fruition depends on the participation of other people and circumstances we have no control over.  You just can't make the sun any stronger any sooner.  Whether you seek healing, your soul mate, a better job, a richer spiritual life you must do the work, plant the seeds, and then you have no choice - you must wait.  These things need a nourishment only time can provide.

So what is the quality of your waiting?  An anxious, fretful waiting does you no good, the antidote to this is not 'make it happen faster', If you happen to succeed what you get is likely to be feeble and sickly.    The space where our dreams swell is sacred space.  The hibernating Earth, the resting sun, the gestation of love and hope are decadent in their stillness and patience.

When it comes to receiving presents I choose to wait excitedly - it helps that I know the end date to my waiting so it's like an energetic sprint.  I know I can sustain my excitement for that period of time and for that time it's like baptising my system in holy water  (you should see me at birthday time!).

  For longer, indefinite waits, those waits for things that are complex and profound there is no pressure to be constantly, or gushingly excited. Instead, I find ways to honor what I am waiting for, to prepare the space for it and keep that space in ready.  I slow down and attend to smaller or more concrete things. And when my body tenses with impatience and urgency I find a way to remember that waiting can be a state of worship and the things I value deserve to be honoured by waiting well.

What you are waiting for is blessed by how you wait for it.  I hope that you wait with hope, with a sense of the sacredness of this in between time in your life and in a way that draws the wisdom of patience into your bones.