Waiting: Like It Or Not

If it’s the beginning of December, it must be Advent.

And if it’s Advent, and you happen to be married to a bishop, you understand that it’s a time of preparation.

(This reminds me of those delightful picture books, by Laura Numeroff, that I used to read to our kids. The first one was If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. She really knew how to write a page-turner.)

Back to Advent now. You get the wreath with the four candles, or maybe just the four candles, lighting one each week, and you do readings from the Prayer Book each evening before supper. Sometimes, if you’re really really hungry, you do them while you start eating, continuing to chew over the content for a while longer, not relying on your husband, trained in Div School, too much for interpretations but struggling sometimes to retain everything in the passages. Rob tells me, “Just let it wash over you.”

If you’re a child, or even an adult, you might also like opening a little window of a calendar each day, growing your anticipation towards Christmas Day. Let’s not even get into the shopping. Many of us have dispensed with most of that as our kids have moved on, rolling their eyes at even the idea of more stuff.

Advent is also when people do the less physically active but just as important activity of waiting — the kind when you’re checking to see if your soul is ready to receive something new and wonderful.

As I understand it, anyway.

What I’ve been thinking about recently is how varied the experience of waiting can be. Sometimes it’s pretty terrific, because we know that what’s just around the corner will be good; the outcome is absolutely certain. Other times, it’s a more harrowing experience, either because the waiting takes way too long, or because we worry that maybe what we’re waiting for will be disappointing or maybe even devastating. Sometimes, in fact, what we’re experiencing is actually more like dread. (I heard a whole radio show on this topic recently).

Here’s a depiction of the kind of waiting that’s just so boooooring.

All these people must really need whatever it is they’re waiting for (your guess is as good as mine — that doesn’t look like a plane, does it?) and probably this is the only way they’re going to get it. They’re being really good sports, too. I don’t see anyone with ear buds on, a detail that may date this photograph. Clearly, they could use some really good tunes.

Songs Not Exactly About Advent

How the Kinks Do Waiting

I bet many of you remember the British band called The Kinks. Their biggest hit — for good reason — was “You Really Got Me.”

Maybe their second biggest hit, which came out in 1965, was “Tired of Waiting.” When I re-visit the lyrics, I find them so wonderful in the clarify of the sentiment expressed. And we also get a realistic sense of how one person’s infliction of waiting on another person can be really annoying. Here’s the key part:

So tired / Tired of waiting/ Tired of waiting for you

I was a lonely soul/ I had nobody til I met you/ But you keep a-me waiting/ All of the time/ What can I do?

It’s your life/ And you can do what you want/ Do what you want/ Do what you like/ But please don’t keep a-me waiting/ Please don’t keep a-me waiting

I love a few things about this, in particular: how starting a new romantic relationship can, at first blush, transform a life for the better, but also how that new person’s way of behaving can cause the flip side of this — frustration and disappointment; also, how (and the music becomes especially bright and sunny at this point) we want people to feel free in general terms, but not when expressing that freedom causes pain to another person (generally, us).

How the Marvelettes Do Waiting

And then, if we dive back into another pop song from the 60s (and why wouldn’t we?) we’ll find a story about a very different kind of waiting — the kind you want someone to do on your behalf, because you’re hoping for something good to result. Alas, the wishing here will be in vain.

I’m talking about a hit from a famous “girl group” and the very first Motown song to make it to #1 on the Billboard chart, back in 1961, when JFK was in the White House: “Please Mr. Postman.”

The guy in this photograph looks cheerful, the way most deliverers on their walking routes look when I see them. You wouldn’t guess from the picture that he’s in the business of disappointing people, would you?

But in this song, he — OK, not this exact same guy — is depicted as holding back on bringing a crucial letter from a boyfriend who’s gone silent for too long. Seen this way, he almost becomes an accomplice in cruelty.

Here’s when the lead singer Wanda Young (the whole song is a brilliant back and forth between lead and back-up voices) becomes most insistent:

You better wait a minute, wait a minute

Oh you better wait a minute

Please please Mister Postman (Wait a minute Mister Postman)

You better wait, wait a minute….

She’s pleading with him, trying to maintain a tone of respectfulness amidst her full throttle yearning.

She’s been waiting so long to get what she wants, she figures that Mister Postman surely can pause just long enough to find the small treasure that she thinks, against all reason, must be hiding in his bag.

Weighting the Waits

So, is there a certain sort of waiting that dominates, is most prevalent? Is the positive anticipatory kind that we’re now experiencing in Advent one that we can replicate all year long as we try to keep looking forward to whatever is around the bend, even if it’s not Christmas? That would be nice. For now, I think I’ll learn from the Kinks that we can maintain some degree of control in our personal relationships and from the Marvelettes that depending too much on receiving something from someone can set us up for disappointment. Those are actually quite similar, and are not even really much about waiting at all.

Oh yes, and I’ll also try to get better at focusing fully on the suppertime readings, however hungry my physical self is.