The Waiting List - January 2013

As usual, January was a month of contrasts down the pond. Daily lows ranged from about  0 to 40 degrees, daily highs from about 10 to 60 I’m guessing. Welcome to a New England January! The January thaws this year could be measured both by the thermometer and the wax and wane of the ice on the pond. (I am desperately resisting the “the moon at our feet” metaphor).  

To some extent aches and pains in January have kept me from my usual morning walks, but my twice daily drives by the pond helped me keep tabs on what was going on. On fine days in the early part of the month, the icy snow was the softest baby blue and white coverlet over the water. That cover was pulled back somewhat during the first January thaw, revealing such a surprisingly choppy navy blue that I wondered if the sleepy turtles and frogs were disturbed beneath. The rest of the month was a contest between snow, water and ice to see which would win the pond. It went back and forth, back and forth, but by the end of the month most of the main pond and all of the lagoon was under a blanket again, except this time it was the steely gray blanket forming from below. Because of all the freeze/thaw cycles the ice is very different than what I showed you last month: during the thaw there were crazy neuron-shaped cracks in the ice, and by the end of the month, especially along the edges of the lagoon, the ice was pock marked like a lunar landscape (shoot there’s that pesky moon metaphor again!).  

My January photo files are a bit thin, but in reviewing them I can see how much the days varied. Fine days, snowy days, foggy days, rainy days and snowy/icy/bare land and water - I would sometimes gasp taking the turn to come down Richardson street, as the pond came into view. It is hard to get bored when each day the view is so beautifully different. 

The birds seemed to adjust well to January's meteorological roller coaster. Off the water, the jay, cardinal, cheery chickadee, occasional robin and other small birds amazed me with their survival. On the water, the mergansers are still here, along with geese, ducks and coots.  Avian groups crowd the bare patches of water at the edges of the pond,  sometimes venturing onto the shore where the coots display their impossibly big feet. I haven’t seen the same daily flocks of geese at the pond as I saw last month, but occasionally I see a gaggle I think will fly. I still wait for them some, although for fewer minutes than earlier in the season: toe numbing comes more quickly these mornings when the temperatures dip near zero degrees.   It is always a blessing to be down the pond, but I feel especially blessed by the sometimes comical, sometimes graceful, but always exhilarating sight of the geese taking off, heading for the enviable unknown.

I touched on waiting in my Christmas post, “The Perfect Present”, but didn't explore the cognitive dissonance I was feeling between living totally in the present and waiting.  Because waiting implies future right? And also the past right because oftentimes you want or don't want something to happen based on what has or hasn't happened in the past? Hmmmm is this waiting stuff the thing that's keeping me from finding my Bodhi tree? Somehow that doesn't seem quite right, especially down the pond, so let me think aloud below.

To my mind the past and future are intimately connected with waiting and in the case of the geese are part of the reason why I wait. Down the pond, watching the geese hundreds of times in the past has shown me that I like when they fly, and helps me to know if this particular gaggle is likely to fly soon. If they do fly, the hundreds of times I’ve photographed them before helps me set the camera to capture them in focus. The future helps me too, nagging that the 9am meeting at the office puts a hard stop on how long I can wait to see a flight. 

So so far the past and future seem to be beneficial in the waiting process. Still undeniably waiting is sometimes a pain when the past and future influence us in a different way. Eckert Tolle in his book The Power of Now says “Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got.” Reading that reminds me of my hour and a half wait for a doctor's appointment a few weeks ago where I fumed and fussed and thought about the 2 hours of work I was missing that I would need to make up that night instead of the planned house cleaning and how could these people not have their act together after being in business for 2 years and for god's sakes all they have for magazines is Sports Illustrated and Family Circle and harumph I have stuff to do goddammit! I was in such a snit that if George Clooney had walked into the office and sat next to me I wonder if I would have been present enough to notice. Yup, in the context of waiting at the doctor's office Tolle's words made total sense both to me and to my righteous indignation.  I wanted what I didn't have and that hour and a half of present moments that I wasted was only valuable in helping convince me to seek another way. 

Down the pond Tolle's words make less sense to me, and that's maybe where the gold lies in this. Although I was waiting for and wanting an explosion of geese in flight (in a hopefully pre-frostbitten future please!), the quality of waiting was different. I am never more in the moment than I am behind the lens here, and I guess that's the key to why my time at the pond, even while waiting, is so meditative and calming to me.  Camera settings are based on what conditions are like right now, how the birds are behaving right now. As they move, as the sun comes out from behind the cloud, things change moment to moment and the photographer has to adjust moment to moment or fail (or at least pay the price in Photoshop purgatory!). Being in the moment alerts me to the bigger picture too so I pull the lens back, hear sounds of other birds, feel the wind.  More and more I can notice and be delighted by other happenings at the pond, like the fog rolling in, even while I wait for the geese to fly and even if they don't fly at all. So, to paraphrase Mr. Tolle, down the pond it seems that I want both what I have in the present and what potentially might occur in the future.
 


So it seems that waiting doesn't wreck my chances at finding enlightenment after all, so long as the past and future inform but don't consume the present moment. This seems pretty easy down the pond waiting for the geese to fly, but I could always improve on it there, and elsewhere I need lots of practice with this model and practice will require lots of effort and creativity. For instance let me replay my doctor's appointment from a few weeks ago. Sitting there, to stay present I could have made a mental list of all I was grateful for in that moment - breathing (always number 1 on my list!), a healthy body, lots of love in my life, that the Red Sox broke the curse of the Bambino, etc.  Or I could have developed my eye as a photographer by finding all the triangle shapes in the room, or by examining how the light fell on all the dour faces waiting there. Or I could have had a Kindle at the ready. Ideas for staying present are plentiful when I am calm with an open unexasperated mind, so I have decided to come up with a list, I will call it a "Waiting List", of things I can do to stay present the next time I am at the doctor's office or in a traffic jam. Doesn't that seem like a good idea?  Hopefully this practice will become a way of life and will enhance my life both down the pond and elsewhere. Or at least hopefully it will help me be present enough to notice when Georgie comes and sits next to me at my next doctor's appointment, or when the mockingbird poses so prettily in a nearby thorn bush as I wait for the geese. :)