Tag: waiting

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.

So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.

— Helen Garner, from “Helen Garner on happiness: ‘It’s taken me 80 years to figure out it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm’” in the Guardian, February 4, 2023

Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call

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You know what, explain this to me. We live with miracles at our fingertips. We fly to the stars. We split atoms. We’ve got robots taking out the trash. Why, are we all still waiting, to live our dreams? Well, there’s a technical term for that in my business, that’s called a shit deal. Our best days are piling up in the rear view, and that hope, it keeps us going, it’s wearing down to the bone. Some of us are losing people we love. And just like that, any day now, that turns into too late. Gone forever. Because every day we’re not living for now, right now, we’re waiting around dying, one empty promise at a time. I’m not waiting around anymore God damn it. Neither should you. The time is NOW. And regret is a killer worse than death.

— Jack Billings (Billy Crudup), Hello Tomorrow! (S1:E1 – Your Brighter Tomorrow, Today. AppleTV+ Original)

Driving Nowhere Fast. At the DMV.

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It’s 10:16 am, Saturday morning, and I’m sitting in the DMV.

My ticket #: A-160. Yes, #160. and that’s just the “A’s”.

I’m watching the attendant at the entrance. She’s conducting emergency room triage, with victims coming through the door in shock, experiencing some form of bloodless trauma.

It’s 79° F, a gorgeous Saturday in late September. And here we are, at the DMV. It’s Saturday for God’s sake, we can’t be here.

“Take a ticket,” she calls out, “grab a seat.” There’s many seats, most taken, a smattering of empties dispersed throughout the room, with a zero lot line between each.  Each incoming patron’s reaction is the same: they look around, inhale, walk slowly to a seat, shoehorn themselves in, and slump heavily into the hardback metal chair.

“Now serving A (pause) 66 at Station 29″

The computer generated voice, a Male voice, calls your number over the loud speaker, calls it again, and then skips to the next. There are Categories A, B, C, D and E, which I’m sure tie to a unique DMV service, but I was unable to (and uninterested in) trying to crack the code.  My attention was on the “A’s”, and the numbers flashing on the overhead monitors.

“Now serving A (pause) 68 at Station 22″

What is it with the DMV that elicits such dread? And why does such a simple process (should be) of license renewal strike such fear?

“Now serving A (pause) 71 at Station 13″

There are no 1% privileges here. No Fast Passes. No Speed Passes. No TSA lines. No CLEAR. No appointments. No tips to jump the line.

You sit, and you wait.  And you wait, and you wait.

“Now serving A (pause) 73 at Station 19″

Heads are down, Smartphones, Smartphones, Smartphones. Not A.D. or B.C. It’s B.S. Before Smartphones. How did we manage without smartphones. What occupied our time? What kept us from going out of our minds?

Continue reading “Driving Nowhere Fast. At the DMV.” →

asleep in the hollows of its rigging, waiting to be stirred

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Gabriel-isak-moon-solitude

[…]

Always tempted, what a sad
combination of words. And so
you take a walk into the neighborhood,
where the rhododendrons are out
and also some yellowy things

and the lilacs remind you of a song
by Nina Simone. “Where’s my love?”
is its refrain. Up near Gravel Hill
two fidgety deer cross the road,
whitetails, exactly where

the week before a red fox
made a more confident dash.
Now and then the world rewards,
and so you make your way back

past the careful lawns, the drowsy backyards,
knowing the soul on its own
is helpless, asleep in the hollows
of its rigging, waiting to be stirred.

~ Stephen Dunn, from “And So”

Credits: Poem: A Pair of Ragged Claws. Photograph: gabriel isak

And suddenly you know: that was enough

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black and white, photography,portrait, eyes closed

Remembering

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is –
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

Wiki Bio for Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).  Credits: Image by Stephan Vanfleteren. Poem: Thank you Whiskey River.