Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Hurry Up and Wait

I'm sure you've all heard the phrase "hurry up and wait". Steed, the guy who picked me up at the airport, said that to me while we waited for the bus. It seems like that's all I have done ever since.

Right now, I'm borrowing bandwidth from one of my next door neighbors while I wait for the housing inspector to come and make sure my house is okay to live in. This strikes me as slightly ironic since I've been living here for about four days now.

I am also waiting to hear about my household goods shipment. Where is it? What happened to it? When will I get it? And worse, will I get it at all? I don't want to buy furniture or dishes or much of anything until I know. So I am waiting to do all that as well.

While I am waiting for these things, I am also waiting for Grant to come home. Time is strange. I've been waiting weeks to see Grant again; that time passed easily. Now that it's only a day away time seems to have stretched out - like we're approaching the speed of light and nothing runs quite the way you would expect.

Of course, once he gets here I'll wish time would keep stretching. But it never does. That's when it shrinks and starts slipping by so fast I can barely believe it when he's gone again.

It will be worse this time because they are only home for five days.

I do other things, sometimes lots of other things. But it seems like, when I'm waiting for something, there's always this little silent bit of me sitting in the back of my mind with its hands folded and its mind focused on what's to come.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "How much of human life is lost in waiting."