WAITING

I'm compulsively on time. In fact, if I'm not ten minutes early, I feel that I'm late. Time is my tyrant with all the earmarks of compulsion - the sense of something driving me, an anxious motor, its low vibrations quickening my pulse rate. I don't know why I'm like this but I can say, given all the time I spend waiting for other people, if I have to have a compulsion about time I'd much rather it was for being late. The idea of other people waiting for me is an unexpectedly pleasant possibility.
     Actually, there's another kind of waiting I think about more. It's the waiting that comes out of magical thinking. Something will happen and I'll be changed - I'll put out a piece of work and its reception will change my life. I'll get this or that or meet someone. and everything will be different. I may as well say I'll win the lottery.
     It's the kind of waiting that flies under my radar, so much a part of me I don't even notice it. I don't notice what it tells me: it's all right to be passive, I don't have to push past my resistance to discipline, I don't have to get up and do anything at all. Waiting's voice isn't as loud as it used to be - I've pushed past many of the things that blocked me - but on days when I don't feel like doing anything, and then don't, those days when I let things slide, I know the voice hasn't died away. I'm sure it will follow me into my grave. 
     It isn't easy noticing core issues, the ones that travel through as silently and invisibly as the blood travelling through my veins. But sometimes, I take a step back, not planning it, and I have a moment of clarity. I see what has been circulating inside;it comes up to consciousness and I can put it into words. That's the beginning of all great change, bringing into consciousness just what has been holding me back. Once I see it, I can move it around, look at it from different angles, and make out its anatomy. I can study how it works in me. I can shake hands with it, no longer in denial, or fear of what will arise, or the obliviousness that comes so easily. And I can surrender to time, acknowledge there are certain issues I will deal with again and again. But I know I will make progress and that's what matters - the sense that I'm heading in the right direction. A momentum starts to build, an appetite for working at change. There is so much hope in that energy, and it's hope that leads me on.