On patience

 If there is something we have learned from the pandemic it's patience. 

This is a different kind of patience than the kind we summon in a traffic jam, or in a long line at the grocery store, or in waiting rooms, or when you're stuck on hold. That petty patience is daily, perfunctory, run-of-the-mill patience. The patience of fulfilling immediate needs. Sort of a small-scale, micro-level patience.

This new patience, pandemic patience, is the type that is required to deal with the inevitable and the unknown. More in line with glacial, geologic time than the hurry of appointments and errands and alarm clocks.

The new patience exists in a dark hallway. All you can see is as far in front of you as your flashlight can illuminate. You don't know how long the hallway is. But the only way to find the end is to keep moving forward. Sometimes the hallway seems to double back on itself, like a maze - haven't I seen this landmark before? Did we make a wrong tun and backtrack somewhere? Why does all of this look exactly the same? 

The new type of patience is not measured in seconds or weeks or inches or miles or other such human-made increments. You can observe the progress of this patience in increments such as new leaves on a plant, or the stages of decay of compost.  It's in my bone cells regenerating, and possibly breaking, and then trying again. It's neurons carving new pathways. It's worms eating their way through a yard full of soil. It is oceans evaporating, mountains eroding, raindrops filling an empty crater. It is so gradual and incremental you'd swear nothing is happening, until somehow you realize your last memory of the thing you were waiting on looks different than the thing you're looking at right now.

This patience can't be rushed, and its end point cannot be predicted. It is deep-down, cellular patience. The kind that comes with crushing grief so overwhelming that it feels permanent and immovable, but then imperceptibly diminishes, until one day you realize enough atomic half-lives have elapsed that you aren't being crushed anymore. At some point you became three-dimensional again. 

We used to joke about the day the pandemic will be officially declared over, as if it were a foreign war or an old-fashioned union strike. We imagined the parties and ticker-tape parades, strangers hugging in the streets, confetti streaming down, music blasting through loudspeakers, fireworks exploding, champagne corks popping. 

That's much more appealing than what is likely to be the truth. It won't end with an exclamation mark, but rather with a long string of ellipses in diminishing font size. You won't know it's happened until after it's over, like late afternoon turning into twilight, or a car disappearing into the horizon of a long, straight highway. 

No way to get there except to give in to the waiting, to get so used to the waiting that you just call it living.