OBSERVATIONS & OTHER ACCIDENTS

On what happens while nothing seems to.

After a few weeks away, here I am again.

These past three weeks of hiatus from the blog were filled with wonderful days of dolce far niente. There was countryside, the sea, and plenty of nature. There was a complete absence of time — and for someone so bound to routine, this is essential. Knowing how to switch off, how to simply be. And here I am not referring to any new age theories, which are often nothing more than facts dusted with rainbow colours and incense. Simply knowing how to be is important.

But that is not what this piece is about.

Today, I want to write about waiting. Waiting has always been something that has unsettled me a little — even waiting for a bus exhausts me, so much so that I will often choose to walk instead of waiting.

Waiting is a very contemporary state, and at the same time a deeply human one. We spend our lives waiting — waiting for a reply, for recognition, waiting for life to begin. As women, we wait for our period to arrive — or not to arrive, depending on perspective (I have done plenty of both). At a certain point in life, we find ourselves waiting for age not to move forward; unlike when we are young, a phase in which all we long for is to reach adulthood. Waiting can be unsettling because the more we wait, the more time seems to stretch, as though the clock has stopped. And then nothing arrives. And as we watch the seconds pass, we forget how life happens in the in-between moments of waiting.

Over these past weeks, I found myself not waiting — not for work, not for answers, not for recognition. And it was precisely in this non-waiting that I began to live and to enjoy these days. Learning to live in the in-between is an art; it is not easy. We are constantly searching for the right answers at the right time, even though deep down we know that life does not work like that.

There is a line by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) that I love: “Live the questions now.” Easy to read, far less easy to live. But it is what is often said of good writers: they enter a story looking for an answer and discover a far more interesting question. And so a narrative is built. One question leads to another and, suddenly, the story takes shape.

Sometimes in life, we simply have to know how to wait. To climb the mountain, through mist and trees that prevent us from seeing the summit. And, as we do so, to notice the vegetation, the animals that live there, the smell of wet earth when the rain appears. To pause, breathe, and continue on the path, even without knowing where it will lead, or when it will end.