How to Wait

When It Seems Like Others Are Busy Making the World Into Something Else

Our apartment building’s new wallpaper (photo by me)

I push the down button again and again, but the elevator is taking forever to arrive. As usual these days. Our apartment building is mid-conversion from rentals to co-ops, and workers have been circulating through the floors renovating unoccupied units and the hallways leading to them. Management takes one elevator off line for worker use each day, but too many of them apparently have too much to do to stick to the one. I can already hear pounding and drilling from the conversion unfolding at the end of the hall. Permits from the NYC Department of Buildings crowding the elevator call buttons assure me that I’m protected by something called a “Tenants Bill of Rights,” but I wonder which amendment says we should be totally fine with the ruckus sounding like someone applying a hammer directly to your skull looking for the softest spot.

I have a love/hate relationship with metaphors — they’re often the handles I use to grip the world, but I also wish they weren’t everywhere all the time and would just shut up for a second. I can’t help but notice that waiting for something to arrive while others busily make the world into something else seems a little too on the nose. The last year brought us some opportunities, some changes, but again we were lodged waiting for things to come. Waiting can be relatively easy in many respects. Our lives tend to run with a reliable rhythm — work, trips to the store for broccoli or milk, laundry on the weekends, books aspirationally piled on a chair next to the couch, some of which actually get read. The effort of life, always unfinished, has a certain vastness to it, but one that (at this point) we can reckon with.

I push the down button again; it sits there like a glowing comma.

Big things will indeed come soon. Our daughter Q has been working hard for something like ever on college applications and everything that goes with them (standardized tests, stressful homework, maintaining Perspective), but she submitted her final ones yesterday. Now we wait to hear which institution will lure her away from us, leaving just my wife and I at home with our kids’ stuff that they want to keep but not enough to take with them. M’s band is getting a little more traction, and he’s working on convincing himself to give the music thing a concerted try. Without kids, our current NYC neighborhood and apartment makes less sense, and this year my wife and I may find a new place to live without anyone else in our house for the first time in 20 years.

The elevator finally arrives, and I hit L. The ride down is full of stops gathering others who’ve been waiting too, workers entering from loud floors and pushing a number just a few floors down, people scrolling on their phones while their dogs, living in their beautiful eternal present, are eager to go out, a kid finishing apple slices on the way to school as her mom stiffly holds her tiny backpack. Finally, the doors open onto the lobby, and we take turns entering our days.

January has begun warm and blustery, and today the wind is strong enough to make the Hudson river look like it wants to discover where it’s from. I’m becoming late for work, but I want to see what the river knows.

What is a happy life? Each time the year flips, this question arrives with its hand out. Sometimes I think I know the answer, or perhaps an answer, but mostly I’m not sure. I’m the kind of person who is always setting out toward understanding, so much so that I’ve made a career out of it, but I’m beginning to think that what I really want is to be a little more free of the need to understand. That, and time to make coffee for my wife each morning, music recommendations from my kids who have grown into people with tastes that should be taken seriously, maybe stumbling across a great bit of writing when I wasn’t looking for it. And every now and then a small dream of mine slightly ahead looking back at me, wanting to be followed.

Louise Glück writes:

All your life, you wait for the propitious time.
Then the propitious time
reveals itself as action taken.

We are all works in progress. What will we do this year? Where will we go? Who will we be? I suppose we will have to wait and see.

Happy 2023, everyone. Let’s keep learning how to talk to ourselves.