Of all of the things in the world that I’m bad at, I may be the worst at waiting. I never asked the universe to teach me patience, because I was legitimately terrified that the universe would. Nobody learns patience the easy way. You literally have to go through terrible crap and then be patient in order to learn patience. It’s like having to be racked in order to learn about torture.
This is a lot of melodramatic language to tell you that for the last week, I’ve been recovering from surgery, which means that I can’t run. The surgery was both good and necessary, I was in unmanageable pain and this should fix it, but the recovery is taking longer than I had planned and I am restless. I look at the Strava accomplishments of my running team and feel jealous. I look at their Facebook posts and feel wistful and sad.
I’m lucky. My diagnosis was in no way life-threatening. Surgery recovery isn’t going to be awful; I should be running again in another week or so.
But this in-between time is hard for me. All in-between times are.
It’s crazy how much of our lives we spend in between things. In between relationships, in between friendships, in between paychecks, jobs, hobbies. In between is at least as permanent as things that we think of as permanent.
But the waiting is so difficult.
The tricky thing is this: there are many different kinds of waiting, just like there are many different kinds of books. And it’s extremely difficult for your heart and brain to communicate effectively about which is which.
On the far left side of the Waiting Bell Curve, which is an imaginary thing that I made up just now, is destructive waiting. This is waiting for very bad reasons for something that is never going to happen, or for something that if it did happen would be a net negative. I knew of a woman who spent 30 WHOLE YEARS waiting for her ex-husband to come back to her, long after he’d remarried, fathered additional children, and moved to another state. She DIED thinking he would eventually come back to her. That’s some Literary Character Next Level craziness.
Then there is “meh” waiting. This comprises the bulk of all waiting experiences. It is waiting for that interminable work conference to be over so that you can go home and crack open that bottle of Pinot and take a damn bath. Waiting for your boss to finally realize how amazing you are after 15 years at the company and not a single raise. Waiting for that guy that you had that one Match.com date with to text you. Waiting to get paid so you can afford to repair your car. Waiting for your kids in the carpool line at school. Waiting for someone else to take out the garbage.
Then, at the far right side of the Waiting Bell Curve, there is the waiting that is a necessary pause, the waiting that is meant to bring you peace and pave the way for greater strength. It carries anticipation with it, like a kangaroo carries a joey in its pouch. It promises that something good lies on the other side, if you can only be patient and learn the lessons that waiting has to teach you. This is the sort of waiting that happens when you are waiting to have a baby, when you are waiting to transition into a job you know you’ll love, when you’re waiting for your kid to come home from college for the holidays, when you’re waiting for the antibiotic to take effect, when you’re waiting for your vacation to happen, when you’re waiting for the person you love most in the world to return from a business trip. It is not easy. But if running teaches nothing else, it certainly teaches that easy is not the same thing as good.
Waiting to start running again is the third kind of waiting, the good kind, but it is hard for my lizard brain to acknowledge this. I’ve had to wait to run again while recovering from a serious race, like my reasonably recent 50k, and I didn’t like that, either. Everything inside me wants to throw a tantrum. Patience doesn’t come naturally to me, and I didn’t want to acquire it unnaturally, either.
But instead I’m going to do the thing that I know I should do, which is lean into the rest. Thanks to running, my body is strong. It may complain at me when I push it into an unwieldy canter again in a week or so; I may not be able to run quite as far as before while still feeling powerful. But the in-between times are important, too: the dusks and the sunrises, the pauses in conversations, the ends of chapters.
It’s what makes us cherish the moment when the door opens again, and the next run begins.
