Waiting

Hello out there!  I am still here, still swirling, just not blogging.  Logged on today and found an unpublished draft that I wrote back in November, about waiting.  There is quite a bit more to the story here, but I guess I will start where I left off...

I would say that patience has never been my strength, but honestly, motherhood changed that and I think that now I can say that I am a fairly patient person. You kind of have to be to navigate a trip to Target with four young children before lunch time. But there is a certain kind of waiting, the kind over which I can exercise little control, that still tests me.
Today in America we cast our votes for President, and many of us are quite passionate about our choice. The waiting for the exit polls...the final results...the inevitable disputes...this kind of waiting usually gets to me, and it is no different today. There seems to be a tension in the air as well, and several folks I've talked to throughout the day are feeling it too.
Then there is the waiting for the results of medical tests...then waiting to speak with a doctor...then mulling over options trying to make the best decision...this all hit me pretty hard last month.
I have friends who are feeling the frustration of waiting for several things: a new job, the right time to start a new career, a long-awaited project to launch. All consumed by the wait time, what happens in between now and then.
It seems that this space that is waiting takes on a life all its own. In my case, my anxiety and worry tend to consume me. But there is also something so interesting about that waiting space...if we really can't control when we will "know" something, we can choose how we fill that space and time. Worry can only cause more problems, so that does not seem to be the wisest choice. I think that how we choose to live in those in-between spaces can reveal a great deal to us about our character. Sometimes it is easy to fill up the waiting with our old stories, the ones we may use to avoid any kind of real change. But what if we decided to create a new story for that space?
Perhaps waiting is really the prelude to possibility, and not just a means to an end.
Perhaps it is during the waiting that the real magic, the real work, is taking place. Something I have been pondering...

I had surgery back in January to remove the (thankfully!) benign mass that was taking up space on my fallopian tube.  All of the waiting for an answer...what is it? why is hurting me? is it cancerous?...served as a much need wake-up call about the way I take care of myself and look after this body that houses my soul.  So much to say here...

More about this soon...