Waiting for news you cannot control

The result comes Thursday, or the call comes whenever it comes, and until then there is nothing to do and nowhere to put yourself. Waiting is its own condition, and it is worse than most answers turn out to be. You have already lived through the bad version eleven times today, in full detail, which costs you roughly what the real thing would cost and buys you nothing at all. Meanwhile the ordinary parts of the day carry on and you are somehow supposed to participate in them.

So give the wait a shape, because shapeless time is what makes this unbearable. Decide now what you are doing with the specific hours between here and the news. An hour with a job in it is survivable. An open evening is not. Put something in tomorrow that requires you to show up somewhere and be seen. Keep the appointments you were about to cancel. You are not distracting yourself from this. You are refusing to pay in advance for news that has not arrived.

And have one thing to say while nothing is happening, because it is going to be a long stretch of nothing happening. Not a bargain. Not a performance. Something plain, said out loud in the car: I cannot control this and I am handing it over for tonight. Handing it over is not the same as knowing the answer. It is putting down a weight you were never able to lift. The outcome was never in your hands. It has always been in His, and that was equally true this morning, before you knew there was anything to wait for.

One more thing worth naming. A wait like this is exactly the shape of hour a cigarette used to fill. It offered a way to make time pass without having to feel it going by. Do not pay for Thursday tonight. Whatever the answer turns out to be, you want to meet it as the person you are becoming, not as someone who folded while nothing had even happened yet. Get to bed. Get to tomorrow. Then do the same again. That is genuinely all the waiting requires of you.