What are you waiting for?

There are so many things we wait for in life. In fact, it is easy to get caught up in the habit of waiting, and even postponing our own lives, our own sense of BEING alive.

Right here right now, do you really feel alive? Are you fully present and content? If not maybe you are stuck on waiting too.

Here are some typical things you, or someone close to you, could be waiting for:

• The kettle to boil
• Godot
• Reaching that carrot on the stick
  
• More time to "X"
• A particular season. (In the Spring I'll finally clean the garage.)
• The fog to clear
• The sun to rise
• The tide to change
• Your ship to come in
• The cows to come home
• Your bus to come
• Your bus to get there
• The ride, any ride, to end..are we there yet?
• Christmas or your birthday
  
• Kindergarten to start, yay I'm a big kid!
  
• Boring dumb school to end
• The keys to the car
  
• Graduation to come
• Being old enough to drink
  
• University life, party party
  
• University to be done with, blah I hate calculus
  
• Someone who really understands you
• Your prince or perfect hot-bod angel to come along
  
• Moving out on your own
• Landing your dream job
• Someone to give you a job, any job
• Your shift or work day to end
• Payday
• A raise
  
• Your turn
  
• Your day in the sun
• Your "big" break
• Your winning numbers to come up
• Lady luck
• Recognition
  
• That vacation you've been dreaming of
• Finding your soul mate
• Marriage
• The chance to have kids
• The baby to be born
• Some alone time with your partner
  
• The baby to become a kid
• More kids
  
• The kids to get older
• The time for quality time with the ones you love
  
• The kids to move out
  
• The kids to get a job
• Your partner to change
  
• The divorce to go through
  
• Your week off from parental duties
• A true empty nest
• Someone to fill the void that's been there all along
• Your kids to spend more time with you
• A chance to write that book of yours
• Time to learn to play an instrument
• Next year to do x, y, z
• Inspiration
• Proof for the existance/or not of God
  
• A miracle
• Forgiveness
• Solace
  
• That jail sentence to end
• An end to the pain
  
• Liberty
• When you will finally get to ..blank..
• The ...blank... war to end
• Something to restore your faith in humanity
• A hero
  
• Obama to (...fill in the blank...)
• A saviour
• World peace
• A sign from the universe
  
• A source of inspiration
• Something to motivate you
• Something to believe in again
  
• A time when I can "truly" live
  
• A reason not to die
• Death
• The Rapture
• Delivery or Damnation
  
• Redemption or reincarnation
  
• To finally "rest in peace"
  

Is waiting a habit for you? Are you in a state of waiting now? Are you hanging off that waiting? If you are do you HAVE to be? Try and notice if you find yourself often in a state of waiting and putting your life, your awareness, your sense of presence and really being here, on hold as a result. A good way to think about it is if you always feel like the grass is greener "over there", or for those "other" people. Then, you may be unconsciously waiting to get on that side of the fence to be able to feel like your life is worth it and you can finally "live". Or maybe you've quietly given up on even trying.

There is no greener grass. Really. It is the illusion. You'd see it if you got "there". It's like a mirage. Once you travel to where you think you'll be happy, the oasis of happiness lingers still on the distance. For every obstacle or trouble that leaves, you'd find more to replace them. And then, you'd just be waiting for something else.

The good news is that true contentment is possible, and achieving it is up to you. Nothing to wait for, no one else to have to depend on, nothing to seek but what you already have to work with.

Below your own feet is grass green enough for paradise, soil enough for seeds, a path to water, a place for roots. All around you is time. Time to do what you want to do, live the way you want to live, be the way you want to be. But, firstly, accept things the way they are.

To stop waiting one needs to get with the program of the present - and embrace it.

A habitual state of waiting can be like holding your breath. Much of our state is actually physically connected to this simple thing - our breath. Much of what ails us can be remedied by connecting to it again.

So, try taking a deep one. Yes, a deep breath. Hold it, then just let it go.

Feel anything different? If you aren't used to meditation, this slight change is an indication of the kind of control you can have over your own inner state. Once you are focused on it, it's nice to breath in and out and just be there in this awareness.

It feels good. Simply living. Simply being in our awareness, and expanding upon it. It even works in the grocery store lineup. This is something we can always come back to. We can always have on hand. We can count on.

From one breath to the next, being aware of being here, being alive and all that we have to be grateful for, can be a path to deep relaxation and contentment. And the good thing is that the only thing you have to wait for, is yourself to give your own sense of awareness a chance.

Things in the world come and go, but you can find a refuge within that will always be there. Have you found yours? And if you have, how often do you visit? How about a permanent vacation? Why wait until you die to rest in peace?

So, what are you waiting for? Hillel the Elder said "If not now, when?"

Who are you waiting for? I say, if not you, who?

Six Random Things About Me

I've been tagged by FrugalNYC to write about 6 random things about me. So here they are:

1. I like crème caramel, but I hardly ever eat it.

If I was Iron Man, crème caramel would be my secret soft spot.

2. If you sing "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" to me, it is an apt tease.

For a time when I was a girl, I wanted to be a nun. Remember Maria in The Sound of Music? Yeah, like that, and like her, it didn't work out for me either. You might still catch me singing in the woods some days though. :)

3. I lived in a house in the woods for a time as a girl

Our house was on Cariboo Lake in the British Columbia interior. No power, only propane lights and an emergency generator. Truly rustic, but breathtakingly beautiful. It was a place where your mind could really be as wide as the sky and touch the stars at night.

There was only our family, some hippy squatters we never saw and an old retired Swiss couple living on the lake at that time. Hmm, maybe that's why I related to the Sound of Music Maria so much?

If you are wondering if I encountered much wildlife at Cariboo Lake the answer is, "Yes!" I had encounters with porcupines, bears, beavers, snakes, many birds, and was even chased by a wounded moose once. Mostly, I would hang out in the yard and draw or do puzzles. Since the yard was lined with lilacs, it was particularly beautiful in the Spring. I would also roam the nearby woods with my dog, Duke, but I never went too far because the ghastly stories the local kids told about grizzlies put me in a state of perma-grizzly-fear. I never did run into the wild frothy insane bear of all those stories though. The only bears I ever saw could care less if I existed or not. Blueberries were far more interesting than I, measly human.

Living in the forest also helped me to understand Walt Whitman better:

There Was a Child Went Forth

THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-Month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—all became part of him.

4. I'm a generalist

It's been hard for me to narrow down an area of study in university because I'm interested in many things, and they all seem interconnected in intriguing ways. I ended up focusing on climatology and ecology because the first involves integrating what we know of the biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and atmosphere to figure out what is going on with climate change, and the second because ecosystems involve all the life in a given area and their environment.

I eventually became interested in ethology/behavioural ecology/cognitive ecology as I came to see that what we are doing to the environement within our respective ecosystems, that impacts on things like climate change, boils down to the minutiae of the daily decisions that we make. What influences these decisions? Genetic factors? Parenting? Peers? Society at large? Random chance experience?



Along the way studying ethology, I've come to have much more respect for animals besides us as sentient and feeling creatures, as well as become interested in the genetic and biochemical factors underlying proximal and ultimate causation behind behaviour.

5. I think I might have synesthesia

I sometimes get one type of sensation with another. Like I will see a colour associated with a smell or massage will cause me to experience the taste of something.

Hmm. Actually, it would be awesome if I could work it so that massaging my temples would cause me to taste crème caramel!

6. I miss my Uncle Jack


My Uncle Jack (center of photo above, beside Joan on the right, who still has a lovely sheep farm) was a real farmer. He lived in Saskatchewan and actually rode a horse to round up the cows, farmed wheat, smoked like a chimney, was rarely without his cowboy boots and hat. He built the rock wall around the house where he, my Aunt Marj and cousin Laurel lived. He had a "pet" Texas Longhorn Steer that he trained for rodeo shows. Tex was adorable in spite of his tonnage, and liked it when I fed him crab apples. Uncle Jack was tough as nails to do the work he did, but always really sweet to me. He'd let me wear his cowboy hat and leather fringed jacket when I was a kid, and I loved to parade around in them and pretend I was a real cowgirl too.

Over the years Marj and Jack's farm became affectionately known to my Mum, Dad and I simply as "the farm". Visiting the farm was like entering story book heaven for me. It literally was Little House in the Prairie to me. My cousin was the country mouse and I was the city mouse, and I always sensed she had the better end of the deal. Yeah, even with the cow patties and the flies. The endless fields, stacks of hay to jump in, runaway hogs that were so big they'd shake the house as they rubbed up on it, chickens pecking in the yard, cats and dogs galore, horses to ride whenever you liked, bulls that would chase you when you jumped in their pen, mud to stomp in and get as messy as you like. These and more made the farm a child's paradise.

Uncle Jack told me once that he tried to get into organic farming but that it was virutally impossible for a man like him to get around all the red tape involved, and that the whole system was laced with strange loop holes and bureaucracy. He complained too about the pesticide planes that would spray neighbouring crops. I would spy cut outs of farmers being quashed by companies like Monsanto on my aunt's desk. As my cousin and I grew, something else strange happened. Modern life creeped in. The TV was contantly tuned in and the song of the phoebe bird was not on any channel. The fields went from green to gold to grey. Smoking in the pit, crashing pickups into ditches and rolling in the hay replaced saddling up the horses and camping in the open range surrounded by song birds, grasshoppers, prairie lilies. What was left now and then was the bone chilling midnight lament of real free range coyotes, one of the last sounds I remember from the farm.

My Uncle Jack and Aunt Marj passed away a few years back, both in their early 60s, and both due to cancer. Today, their farm house, like so many other empty homes I've seen dotting the Saskatchewan plains stands cold and empty. I hate to think of mice, mildew and cobwebs taking over where once a family flourished. I've considered moving there myself, but considering that the ground water isn't potable, and what an agriculutral student told me once about his job working as a crop sprayer, I try and stay as far away as I can myself.

It's up for debate as to why my aunt and uncle died so young. Was it only due to Jack's smoking? My own suspicion that all the chemicals used in modern farming that they were surrounded with was a big part of the reason. I'm wondering what other people's experience is with health and living in the bread basket of America.

To me, Uncle Jack's home, a home he helped build with his own hands, stands like a hollow reminder of how we have gone wrong on this continent from the railway middlemen who originally took price control from farmers, up through things like Enron and the recent economic collapse. Because of what Uncle Jack represented to me, I'm thinking I'd like to take a better and closer look at modern agriculture, its effects on the small farmers out there. I long to leave the big bright city for the rural roads, green pastures dotted with cattle and sheep, and sweet smelling stacks of hay. Some people call me an idealist, and tell me that I don't know really know what I'm talking about when I wax poetic about the life pastoral. That I don't really know what life in the country is like and that I would probably change my mind pretty quick if I actually had to live there.

Well, the picture below is of me and my cousin Laurel riding out in the pasture when we were young. It's evidence enough that my thoughts are more than just distorted memories and idealistic dreams. It's evidence enough that something has been lost, and I just need to find the smoking gun.


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If you are on the list below, you've been tagged to post about 6 random things about you!

• Yesterday's Glitter
  
• Raincoaster
• Wowie Whispers
  
• Perro...K!?
• Essential Prose
  
• David Niall Wilson
  

THE RULES (for this game of tag):

1. LINK TO THE PERSON WHO TAGGED YOU
2. POST THE RULES ON YOUR BLOG
3. WRITE SIX RANDOM THINGS ABOUT YOURSELF
4. TAG SIX PEOPLE AT THE END OF YOUR POST AND LINK TO THEM
5. LET EACH PERSON KNOW THEY ARE TAGGED AND LEAVE A COMMENT ON THEIR BLOG
6. LET THE TAGGER KNOW WHEN YOUR ENTRY IS UP
7. DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN (not actually a rule)