The Place

The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.

 Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. 

 Everyone is just waiting.

         —Dr. Seuss

Today I watched the sunset in my rear view mirror.

As I was seeing the fire of the reds, oranges, pinks, and blue hue into dusk, that line crossed my mind — Today I watched the sunset in my rear view mirror — and I wondered how much I do that. Not just with sunsets though: with decisions, with friends, with my life. How often do I choose to mull over memories of the great times I had with my friends — the Dictator Rap in a hotel in Kansas City, beating Woodcrest at MACS, our trip to Duluth last February, my wedding day. Of course, I'm not trying diminish the good and wonderful qualities of memories. But sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time remembering how close I was with my friends and roommates instead of making the sincere effort to get together with them again, to reconnect with a phone call, to make new memories.

I know why I do this. It's my personal defense against the other extreme which I know I live in too often. And it's the Waiting Place. Only my version of Dr. Seuss' famed "Waiting Place" has cabinets and closets full of wishes, desires, and coveting. For nearly all my life, I've felt like I'm in the Waiting Place—waiting to be in high school, waiting to graduate, waiting to go to Northwestern, waiting to finish college, waiting to marry Brett, waiting to get a job, waiting to get my real job, waiting to buy a house, waiting to have a family, waiting to start my life.

I have always felt this push for what's next, knowing that if I can just get to the next phase, then I will be truly happy. Only when I get there, I find myself only in another room of the Waiting Place. There's something else, that if I only could attain it, would make me complete. And thus the maze of the Waiting Place has wound me into a state of dissatisfaction and restlessness.

It's so easy to peer into that rear view mirror at the times when—I see now—I was content. And it's so easy to stare into the future and speculate on my happiness when I have a house all to my own and little Brett and Lindsays running amok. I try to focus the lens, focus it on the here, the right now. To live this minute, this second, to its fullest.

And to learn to be really, truly content.