Waiting

Waiting is the active observation of anticipation or dread.  You wait for a thing to begin or to be over.  You are waiting for consequences of things done and yet to be done and things left undone.

You are waiting for things outside your range of activity to be done and for the opportunities to do things on your to-do list.

You are eager for a dental appointment to be over, you are sorry when a massage comes to the moments of alcohol splash and a friendly pat, goodbye.

You wait for ideas to get through the introductory phase, wanting them to lurch into the parts where you feel as though some of your insides have disconnected and are now working the inner room of your body.

You wait for the next sentence after your agent tells you, “Okay, now what?”

And what about when your editor tells you, “I’m sending you some notes.”

Waiting is the thing your characters do to a worse degree than you do them.

Readers wait for characters to get into more trouble, then wait for these same individuals to work their ways out of these difficulties.

You would rather be in and bored than not engaged, waiting for something, say an idea or a decision or a note from a publisher,

In any given time span, you are awaiting responses, someone else’s and your own.  You are waiting for defining moments to occur and for moments of decision to arrive. You are waiting to understand things you have read and written.

You are waiting to hear from individuals to whom you have sent communications or addressed remarks.  You are waiting to hear from publishers, from readers, from students.

You are waiting for plans to help you move out of and beyond situations where you feel as though you are caught between misaligned emotions, conundrums for which there is no answer, situations not likely to grow better or suddenly learn how to speak.

If Reality has a use-by date, you are waiting to find what it is, hopeful then of discovering what it wants from you in return for what it seems willing to give you.  Sometimes you ask yourself if Reality’s job is to provide event or mere anticipation of event, which may come forth or not, depending on something no one likes to speak or write about, which is whim. Other times, you find yourself wondering if the GNP of Reality is waiting.

You were having a dream this morning that, as you were coming out of it into wakefulness, you recognized as pleasant. The dream may well have had a sexual undertone because you were aware of its nuanced quality of tension, excitement, giddy anticipation.  You may have been out working the room so to speak because your dream editors would not let you see who your partner was, a lovely clue you were thinking of someone you ought not.  You woke from the dream, then lay there, your thoughts as companions, for the better part of two hours before you could recapture sleep, even then the topic was the dream equivalent of a PG rating, and so, from an easygoing pleasing dream, you moved into a waiting period, in a real sense casting the next session of sleep, wondering all the while how you could persuade a similar dream level to heave into port, experiencing the kinds of tension that sometimes come on a movie or TV set during shooting sessions, misty, dour, bone chilling.

Waiting for a dream in hopes it will have a restricted rating is at the height of folly, giving you time to fight off thoughts of being practical or prudent, allowing moments in which your wait has you afloat on a bed of self-awareness of being silly.  You wait for the silliness to pass, encouraging it to drift into some scenario of action rather than mere patience or hope.

As a person who writes for publication, you wait for events you orchestrated for others when you performed executive publishing activities, feeling the frustration of not being able to set certain activities into motion that would be inappropriate for you to do as a writer but which, given the evolving nature of publishing, formatting, promotion, and campaign launching, are growing more appropriate.

At present, you have six classroom sessions a week, which have attendant out-of-classroom care required for them.  This schedule applies on top of writing chores, including the book-length project, The Dramatic Genome.  This has put you in a position you enjoy, where you may be waiting for the classes to be in session, but you are scarcely in the suspended state of simple waiting for event.

You have literally and in figurative ways, put yourself on an even keel or par with waiting.   To the best of your belief, the thing you are best at waiting on relates to writing. This is not to say you are patient nor resigned, rather you have negotiated a sense of accommodation with it, a sort of pact between two longtime associates, each of whom recognizes the strangeness of the relationship, and has allowed an atmosphere of respect to settle in.

Nevertheless, waiting is a consequence of being alive.