The Waiting Room

The proximity of death grows closer with each year, bringing a new perspective and a freshened sense of one’s axis shifting. Aging brings surprises — some wrapped in darkness, some in penetrating light. Each reveals. I have more pain and more clarity. I know I am more firmly ensconced in ‘the waiting room,’ hanging around for the final act.

Learning to wait has been illuminating. I had the illusion that I grasped death, but learned that each time I have a more vivid experience of it, I am introduced to a little more of its inscrutable nature. I’ve had my near-death experience, but this year’s birthday depression and a bout of chronic pain, made clear the uselessness of my life, and the emptiness of my efforts.

I discovered I don’t really exist because of what I do. For me, dying, this time around, made it really clear to me, that changing the trajectory of cultural life, of trying to make a difference, is not why I exist. These are not my accomplishhments, and it wouldn’t matter if they were. I am here not to satisfy, or meet, any criteria. The waiting room, enduring with the constant vulnerability of death, is about existing at a basic stripped-down level. I am not here to do anything.

To wait well is like active listening. Something inside is poised, like a cat about to strike. The chime of final freedom is about to go off, but it isn’t time yet. Waiting is a suspended movement, somewhere mid-way. Focused upon the inevitable, but not there yet. This is a state all its own. And, it goes on as long as it goes on. Enduring the formless, the obsolescence of identity, the substantial weightlessness, of being a non-being, is extremely corrosive and freeing. There is nothing but the moment.

A kind of radical dementia is altering everything. Focusing attention upon the moment, breaking the remaining bonds with what was, or what one thought one was doing, in favor of an awareness of what is unfolding. An opening is occurring, it isn’t a portal to another world, instead it is an aperture that reveals the current one like never before.

Waiting is like the beginning of a hallucinogenic experience. The world is slowly softening up. Things are flowing into each other. One’s sense of perspective becomes more fluid, taking on a disorienting depth, and effecting one’s sense of balance. Maintaining any sense of poise inside such an overwhelming experience is useless.

I don’t know how long I’ve dwelled here, I didn’t notice when I came. I think I have been in and out. Now it seems to be a feature of this part of my life, enhancing things and providing a mostly ambivalent clarity. I’m ready to move on, and I’m not ready at all. The waiting room is a mostly invisible landscape that haunts, besieges and reminds. I am not really alive without it, but hardly alive with it.

The waiting room gives me a place to ponder my existence, to view the scales, to feel the weight of eternity, to grapple with the essential mystery. Now, this seems like a blessing, a chance to sum up the whole. I can see the holes, the places and people, I didn’t give enough of the right kind of attention, and I can feel the burn of loss, knowing the chances will not come again, but also knowing that these recollections have timeless meaning.

I no longer have aspirations, or yardsticks to measure me by; the time of goals is past, now I think I am shorn of pretense. In essence, I am more relaxed, more present and available. This is the time when I am ripe, alive, and perhaps most nutritious. It is the time when I am here, but not for long. This is the time when I can offer the greatest perspective, and the most wisdom, as it is a time when knowing isn’t as emphasized as uncertainty.

It seems possible that the waiting room is holding me, while I discover there is even more to me than I imagined. The transcendent being, who is me, gradually comes, more and more, into awareness. I am not I, instead I am a gradually discernable placeholder, a facet of the Universe that is celebrating another expansion. I — no longer expresses what this being is experiencing. The waiting room just might be the final incubator, the place where a kind of invisible and effortless transformation prepares the way for a more profound change.