Coping with the wait

It seems the theme for our life right now is waiting: waiting to hear, waiting to see, waiting to know... and it is no longer the short wait we thought it would be: it's a long wait, and the length of it somehow attracts complications, each of which comes with its own added wait -- or weight, as the case may be.

I think we're doing a pretty good job of living with the uncertainty of it all: we're older now, less impatient, more inclined to believe that things have a way of falling into place if you let them.  But it's still an uncomfortable place to sit, and we seem to spend a lot of time distracting ourselves and amusing ourselves as a way of softening both the hope and the potential of disappointment.  All of which explains why I found these words from David Whyte's poem, Winter Apple, so moving:

Wait longer
than you would,
go against yourself,
find the pale nobility

of quiet that ripening
demands...

 

taste...
the sweet inward stillness
of the wait itself.

 

I am trying hard to think of this as a ripening time; working to take on that mantle, the pale nobility of quiet; doing my best to taste that sweet inward stillness.  

 

But some days it's a struggle.  Hard not to be haunted by the longing for what's next...