Waiting

I have lost my voice again. I open my mouth and nothing comes out, though the words exist fully formed and spoken. I have lost my voice and somehow found it: a clarity I have not been afforded in the past twelve months and have now discovered in this odd, liminal period of waiting. But it is yet, all in my head. Words jammed there like so many tumbling marbles.

I have been struck dumb like this too many times. If we are too believe in the power of the chakras, then my being is ruled by my throat. My weakness. A thyroid that rules the roost and throws something of a hissy fit when she does not, ironically, feel heard.

The prosaic part of me says this happens in January, when I have exhausted myself and by sheer will alone have got through the familial and business related demands of the festive season without falling prey to the colds and flus felling all those around me. That mine is a constitution governed by stubbornness and it is only when my head tells my throat that the Christmas tree is down and all is done for another year, that my body finally allows herself to retreat within.

But the romantic part of me says that this happens when I am waiting. The way I was when my whole being was yearning to be pregnant and my voice vanished for over a week, only returning when I realised that Father Christmas had indeed popped a baby in my stocking. The way I was too, when I was waiting for my little cottage to sell so that we could be the family I hoped we would be a few years ago. My voice silenced as if I dare not speak for giving away hopes and dreams that might not come true. For I am waiting. For what I don’t quite know, but there is a part of me that is sure that change is coming. That life is about to turn a corner all over again and that short of holding my breath, the only way my body knows how to survive that which feels interminable is to to put a stop to my merry gallop with a dose of silence I must endure long enough to clarify for myself what it is my heart is yearning for. The truths I like to keep tucked away from myself. The kind that aren’t even scrawled into the busy, floral pages of my journal for committing them to paper might just jinx whatever is in store.

Waiting is an art isn’t it? A talent not many of us are blessed with, desperate as we so often are for change. For reward for our efforts. For acknowledgment. For joy. More, now, again. Patience now something most of us would like to go the way of video players and woodchip wallpaper. An old-fashioned notion we would happily leave to the generations before us so we can carry on consuming what we like, when we like. As if life and all its pleasures were a god given right there is no time to wait for. As if in fact, time now moves faster than it used to and we have got to keep up or else what might be ours will be swallowed up.

But over the past year I have learned that while patience doesn’t come naturally to me, it does have its own rewards. For when we wait, we create virtual waiting rooms in our head, and find ourselves enjoying what I want to call creative rumination. Thoughts we might never have been blessed with. Ideas that have time to blossom in the meantime. Different points of view there may not have been time to consider. While it may not come naturally, waiting is often something forced upon us and we can either choose to embrace the space and clarity it creates or waste our own time raging against it.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Ram Dass

I have chosen to embrace it. I have chosen to call it opportunity. To make the most of the silence. The gap in-between what was then and what might be tomorrow. And now I find myself staunchly tolerating what I do not treasure about my life as I wait for all that it is I am conjuring up in this renaissance of self, knowing full well that I am not wholly in control of what will be, but that the mere act of being forced to stop, to pause, to wait is a sort of strengthening of the soul I might not otherwise have been blessed with.

And I think perhaps I am better for it. you know? That this is what was necessary for me to come to the conclusion that I have to stop running towards whatever is next and let it come to me, for I am enough as I am. I am good enough. I may not have the power to alter what happens next, nor to force others to think what they are not yet able to imagine, but can instead simply wait and let what will be take its own course.

Preferably with a nice hot teacup full of honey and lemon, for I do believe that what is for us never passes us but I would rather be comfortable while I wait, if you wouldn’t mind?

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