The Lost Art Of Waiting

I had to run to the post office.
Ours is a little country post office.
It actually closes from 12:00-2:00 each day for lunch.
Often there will only be one person at the counter.

The parking spaces for the mail trucks are empty since they are out on delivery.
The person working the counter is usually in the back working.
When I get to the counter, I have to ring a bell to let her know that I am there.
I usually hit the bell softly, since I know that she is busy finishing other things.

I needed to mail two bubble envelopes.
I remember when I was able to put a few stamps on this and it would be fine, I said.
Not any more, she said, the machine has to read the envelope.
She said those words as she put the bar code with the amount I owed on the top right corner.

Since she is my peer, we reminisced about simpler times.
We talked about face to face relationships that social media and phones have changed.
I guess you see it all, I surmised.
You would not believe it, she answered.

Often, it is just me and when there is a line, you see the impatience of people, she remarked.
They stand there looking over the left shoulder then the right of the person in front of them.
They look to see what I am doing, she said in a frustrating tone.
No one knows how to wait any more, I mused.

I then I heard myself remembering something out loud.
The words that came out of my mouth were totally unrelated to a post office line.
Yet, on many levels, they spoke of the same problem.
It was something I had been thinking about for a few days but had not vocalized it.

Remember when a new record album came out? I asked her.
I could see her remembering in her mind’s eye.
I sure do; I would go to the store right away, she said.
Me, too, I agreed; I would save my money so I could buy the album on the day it was released.

Other people would have the same idea; remember the lines? I asked.
I would get to the store and find the new release and take the album from the shelf.
I couldn’t wait to get home and play it on my stereo, I admitted.
I would take off the plastic, remove the vinyl album carefully, and put it on the turntable.

She smiled as I said all those things.
I could tell that she had similar memories.
I would lie on the sofa with the album across my chest and listen all the way through.
Then when the one side ended, I got up and turned the record over, I remembered.

Those were the days, she said.
Wonder if they will ever come back? She asked, not expecting an answer.
It was the anticipation that was so special, she added.
Now everything is instantaneous, I commented.

And people are still not satisfied, she said talking from experience.
Buying a new album on the day it was released was the best! I said excitedly.
We said our goodbyes and I drove home.
The thrill of waiting, going to the store, buying an album, and bringing it home is not known.

We download music.
We get it immediately.
No driving is required.
However, something is missing.

The woman at the post office was right.
Anticipation.
Saving, planning, choosing, and finally buying the album.
Listening, being ever so careful not to scratch the vinyl; getting up to turn the record over.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12)

In our fast paced, get it now culture, waiting is a lost art.
Instant everything makes us unaccustomed to waiting.
We expect speed and immediacy.
When our hope is deferred, we do not know what to do.

Waiting is inevitable.
We wait for a spouse.
We wait for a baby.
We wait to hear if you got the job, or the house, or the promotion.

We do not do well with waiting.
It is almost as if we are not wired to wait any more.
What our culture considers slow would have been lightning fast a generation ago.
How much faster can we go?

How immediate do we expect things to be for us?
How much have we lost in expediency that we would gain if we learned to wait?
When things come so easy and so fast, do we expect that to be the way of things?
Have we lost the ability to be resourceful when we have downtime?

The great thing about Google is that it takes you straight to the information you want to find (or, in any case, straight to the information that the Keeper of the Algorithm wants you to find). The great thing about every other method of organizing and/or delivering information is that it DOESN’T take you straight to the information you want to find. Back when I was walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, if you wanted to know something you had to go to the library and get a book. And in order to get that book, you had to walk past a lot of other books. This quaint fact accounts for a good 20% of my education. Fetching a book about, say, Shakespeare required me to scan whole shelves of other books about Shakespeare—books I didn’t even know I wanted or needed to read. In graduate school it wasn’t unusual for me to emerge from the stacks with six or seven books, but not the one I originally went looking for. You don’t know what you don’t know, and sometimes the only way to find out is through that highly inefficient, often inconvenient process known as wandering around. But as GK Chesterton observed, “an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”
(Jonathan Rogers, from, The Habit, his weekly letter about writing)

Anticipation.
Wandering around.
Happening on another book or another record.
Holding it in your hands when it finally becomes yours.

There’s something about that memory that is very sweet to me.