I’ve been on the waiting list for a plot in the community garden in my neighborhood for what seems like ages. I had forgotten all about it until I got an email last week. You may have a plot in the garden, it said. I rolled my eyes with the tease of it all. The “wait just a little longer”. The “it just might happen” message.
I’m staring anxiously at this imaginary garden plot in my head, wondering what it will be like to plant and water and weed. I wonder what it will be like to sit down next to my plants and read. I wonder if I will find it easy to make time to walk over and water my plants when the sun is hot and I’d rather be in my air conditioned home. The harvest seems so far off when I consider everything that I’ll have to do to get me there.
We wait a lot in life, don’t we? I have friends waiting for job offers, for positive pregnancy tests, for proposals, for acceptance letters, for book deals. We wait for resolution, for diagnoses, for healing. We wait through addiction and conflict. We wait through presidential terms of office, through divorce and adoption processes and separation. We wait for laws to change and systems to update. Waiting is painful. We feel so little control over the mystery of life. We plant the seed and we can’t see anything grow. We set out a path but we get lost. Our glasses fog over and our maps get soggy.
I’m in that long stretch of life that feels no longer young and hopeful and not yet wise and weathered. I’m no longer a maiden, not yet a mother, and a long way from being a crone. I feel ill prepared for this stretch of uncertainty. I wait out the long stretches of grief, the sweet uncertainty of the question of finding a life mate. I wade through the muck of hesitation and stress, trying to navigate a professional path through what sometimes feels like a swamp. I try to wipe my glasses off but they become more foggy, as the ground becomes more muddy. Waiting feels like wading… through sand, through mud, through tears.
I’m trying to find the gem here, the glimmer of hope in this tremendous struggle. Just as I’m waiting to get the email that says “you got the garden plot!”, I’m waiting for some profound answer to show up so I can tell the internet that I solved the puzzle, I won the game.
The harvest seems so far off, but I bet we have stories to share with one another. I bet we can offer someone a cup of tea. I bet we can give someone a boost of extra courage when they don’t feel like watering their plot. Maybe we don’t come upon the gem of the Final Answer, but we celebrate with others when their seasons of waiting are over. There are friendships to be found here in the waiting. There is love. Maybe through the waiting, we’re finding the answer that’s been buried and growing from the deeply rooted seeds we planted long ago. Maybe the harvest is not a tangible thing at all. Maybe the harvest - the answer, the Thing - is being together through it all.