I used to have posts pouring out of my brain,but now when I write it's a struggle. My words have been a term paper, dry and impersonal. A term paper on the development of dental floss.
I can't figure out exactly why everything lies flat and two dimensional when I press my thoughts down on the keyboard. Perhaps it is because I am busy. Perhaps writing is for the solitary soul alone in a cabin with fourteen cats.
Perhaps it is because I am preoccupied with boxes and packing tape, paint and bathroom cleaners. Where's the fun and excitement in those topics?
It's frustrating. I feel the words inside of me, but they are so far down in my toes that my brain can't reach them.
I am learning the art of waiting. I am fishing, fishing, fishing, for the right thing to write. I know that what I want to say, what I need to say, is in there somewhere. I have tried diving, and dynamiting, and carrying on as usual. I have not really tried waiting.
I am trying it now. Not just in writing and other fun hobbies but in almost everything else in my life.
I have spent three months waiting to move into my h-o-u-s-e and this Wednesday all that wait will be over. I have so much to do before Wednesday that it seems a million years away, the impossible goal. If I think about what I need to get done, I will freeze or implode, so I just start working and see what happens.
I am pregnant too, and I have another six months or so of waiting for baby, but I don't like to jump that far ahead, to babies and bloodshed and sleeplessness and sweetness. It seems like a lifetime away. So, I take my prenatal vitamins and my naps and I wait for that too.
I have so far learned that waiting is maddening if you are not committed to the waiting. If you don't see the wait as a destination, as a place to be, you constantly are trying to push through it, to reach the place where there is no more waiting. That sort of pushing is exhausting. It will make you crazy. There is always something to wait for. There is always something that isn't perfect.
You know what else will make you crazy? Moving, while pregnant, two days before Christmas.
You know what will keep you sane? Cinnamon rolls in the morning, mixed with the scent of the Christmas tree (which we will be hauling down the freeway next week)(but, I'm not thinking about that right now). Christmas music during dinner, and a handy supply of clementines. Living in the moment even though you are waiting for something in the future.
People have been writing and talking about Christmas and what they are doing to celebrate.
I am waiting, pregnant with baby and expectation. And, I am learning to enjoy the wait. Isn't that what being a Christian at Christmas is about anyway? To live in waiting?
