Are your dreams on hold? Are you floating in a perpetual state of waiting? One more number? One more indistinguishable face in the crowd, chasing through an exhausting schedule that seems like nothing more than clocking time? 
You’re following the hour hand and the minute hand with your eyes, listening to the slow ticking of time’s indifferent tally, its looping course and in no hurry when you’re in a state of wait. Then time scurries cruelly, and your chest tightens as days overflow their container of tasks.
So you’re counting down the hours until something is finished and you’re on to the next. Counting down the minutes until you begin again, from yet another starting line.
Schedules vs dreams
How long until the baby’s nap, until you can leave your desk for lunch, until it’s time to get in the car and clock another commute through traffic? What next, after picking up the child or two or three, minutes for hasty and distracted exchange, defrosting a roast, clearing the table after dinner, a glance at the clock as you calculate the schedule for homework, for baths, for checking your emails?
Relationship? Is relationship on its own clock, squeezed into a slot, scattered around the other musts and shoulds of parenting and earning?
Only two months until the long weekend, ten weeks until taxes, five months until the final exam, three months until the doctor, four years until vesting, eight until retirement. Until, until, until. . .
Watching the clock
My parenting job has another twenty months on its timer. My body is worn; time drags and time disappears, as it has for 18 years. There is only this: my younger son to fly the nest; the knowledge of two children, launched; then, whatever comes next.
I will have watched the clock and clocked my time. Schedules versus dreams in a constant trade-off. Responsibilities versus passion when I permit myself to decipher a day, a day of putting in time, doing the job: the new job, the old job, the next job. These are the necessary concessions of ordinary life.
Putting in your time
We put in our time as children, waiting for adulthood. We put in our time as adults, chasing and working the next opportunity, waiting for the big break, for the encounter to lead to “happiness,” for the promotion, for the romantic interlude, for the right amount of months or years in a relationship. We put in our time in marriages, as though the arrival of another anniversary should be reward enough. By then, we do not scrutinize; if we’re fortunate, we are dulled by clocking time.
We watch and worry and cradle the child’s heart; we nod and listen as growth flutters under our wing. We nourish and instruct, we guide and discipline, we hold and release. We count these moments preciously, when we can, even as we’re clocking time.
What are you waiting for?
When we reinvent ourselves we are required to prove old capacities and new competence, to fight so we may regain ground. To trace the hands around and around the face of the clock. This is the inevitable, the tedious, the natural, the acceptance of contemporary life. Our analysis of self and day and stage is steeped in the awareness of time, bound to cycles, to rhythms, to tides.
- Are you in a state of waiting?
- Are you setting aside a dream?
- Are you on auto-pilot?
- Is it only natural that we all clock time?
Exquisitely written, beautifully rendered. Yes, I am in a constant state of waiting and watching and wanting. I think we all are. As humans, we train our gaze on the unfurling future, on the bits and pieces predictable and more elusive. We mark time’s passage with milestones. We grasp for these stones, these objective markers, as signs of progress and pace. I think all of our days, however different, are messy exercises in balancing passion and prudence.
I think we all seem to spend time in a state of waiting. The bigger question is do we know what we are waiting for: a new job, a new love, a new home, children to grow, college to end, etc. The trick is to not set aside the dream while waiting for the next knock of opportunity.
Just last night I accused of myself of spending too much time looking for the New New Thing, always waiting, planning, plotting. But at this very moment things are okay. I like my job, I like the bit of writing I’m getting to do, I feel content with the important relationships in my life. And I think I’m okay with being on auto-pilot right now, because usually I’m banking and swooping too suddenly.
My initial reaction was to write: No! I don’t do this anymore. After years of working for the weekends, “always getting ready to live but never living,” and counting every moment until the good stuff could start – I have stopped waiting and jumped in with both feet. My eyes may be closed but I have still jumped in. But then I realized, sure, I have made a lot of changes and live more in the now and all that, but I have to agree with Aidan in that our nature as human beings is to look to the future – to wait. So I guess it is always a work in progress then.
Rebecca – Lovely to have you here.
I really enjoyed this one (well… all of them… you always leave the wheels cranking along in my brain!)
It’s so hard to stop and enjoy, to be content where you are. Growing up you’re rushed from one stage to the next, and then you get to where you’re “supposed” to be and just think… is this it? You never really know 🙂
Is this it?
I started a post with that very title a few weeks back, and chose not to publish it. To let it roll around on the page and in my head, before putting those words front and center.
But I am certain there are millions of us who ask ourselves all the time is this it?
And I immediately think of Thoreau and his reference: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. And surely, so do the women.
It’s interesting that we rarely see the remainder of Thoreau’s quote, which is a shame. We look at the head, without seeing the body. Here is the quote in entirety (to the best of my recollection), which is ultimately even more bittersweet:
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
The implication – we all have “song” in us. We have only to give it voice. Not so easy in Thoreau’s time. Not so easy in ours.
It is one thing to be waiting in a relatively warm environment where you already have the comforts, company and resources. It is another when you willingly step outside in the cold because your house is on fire. You know instantly that there is a limited time before you freeze to death. You need to find a new place to live before someone discovers your body in a snow bank.
~translation~ Some people are on a negative slip, whether it is increasing debt because of unemployment, or faltering health due to lack of health insurance. Some people have the luxury of living in the moment, others don’t.
I think about a scene in a movie I watched when I was a little kid. Thousands of penguins lined up along a bank, looking North. Waiting. Waiting for what? I asked myself. Waiting for what? The answer never came.
Then I think of myself, dreaming of the time when I will once again have “spare time” in the evening. Time when both of my babies are asleep. Waiting.
I think of my brother who will leave to serve a mission in a few months. 2 years. I will miss him. Waiting.
Yes, we wait. We watch the clock. We wonder “is this it?” But, then, we catch those moments, hours, days, weeks, months, when we feel we are right where we are. Yet, even in those moments of bliss, we still wait. Is a disaster going to hit?
Interesting and thought provoking post. When does the future become right now?
So true, and so much my life. Waiting, always waiting. Waiting for the flare to end, waiting to be able to afford the supplements and essential oils I need to be able to properly treat my chronic illnesses, waiting for my stepson to hit 18 so the child support will stop and we’ll have that extra few dollars for the things WE need . . .
But waiting, although it is a constant in my life, is not all of life. There are also things that CAN be done while I wait for the things that aren’t here yet, and I do those, in preparation for the time that I can do more. There is always something that must be waited for, but life is like a garden; and if you neglect the necessary maintenance while you wait for the harvest, the harvest may never come, or it may be so much less abundant than it could have been.
I sit at my computer everyday watching time tick by on the computer clock. I do nothing and it ticks by just as quickly as when I do something important. It drives me crazy how the time disappears disproportionately to the amount of work I get done.
I don’t feel like I’m waiting, I feel like I’m scrambling to find time to act and if I take the actions things will happen. All I need is the time. Great.
Yes. Just, yes. So much waiting. And I realized years ago that waiting for “it” (life? happiness? joy? reality?) to start until X or Y had happened … waiting for it AT ALL … was futile and the quickest way to squander my life. And yet, somehow, that realization has not helped me to stop doing it. Sigh. Thank you for your (as always) thoughtful thinky thoughts!