Jewels from the Dark

I grew up in a military family and one of my early life lessons was to hurry up and wait. The concept meant you had to make sure you were at least 15 mins early to everything (or an hour early, which is still my comfort zone…) and then you have to actually wait for the event to start. Hurry up and wait. Hurry up and get from one place to another or from one event to another and then sit and wait.

I always looked at that concept as a reason to rush and rush to arrive and then have a good book – or four – in your bag so you could occupy yourself while you waited for life to catch up. It had a harried sense of urgency and yet a sort of apathetic requirement to just sit.

In the last three years since my injury, I have had plenty of experience in hurry up and wait. Countless doctors appointments, five surgeries so far, months of immobilization and recovery, hours and hours of waiting. I thought I was doing ok with it all. But today, after a glimmer of hope that there was finally a tiny light shining in the distance where I would regain some of my function and life, my next surgery was denied. It’s a doozy of a surgery, so it’s not surprising the insurance company would initially deny it. But it’s also necessary. So now, I hurry up and wait. Again.

In my attempt to reframe how I look at situations and circumstances, I am reassessing my view of hurry up and wait. I still seem to feel intense need to sprint to the next stage of my life, but I am also looking differently at the waiting. Waiting has never come easily to me. I can be patient, I just prefer not to be…

Yet, this waiting is totally out of my control. I have to wait for the next doctor’s appointment and then wait for test results and medical reports and preauthorizations to be submitted and reviewed and decisions to be made about my life and care. All of which I have zero control over. So what is the jewel in this stretch of darkness? What is it that, while the light at the end of the road may be fading, may still reflect off the beauty that is this moment?

I am learning how to sit and find the tiny glints of beauty where I am, instead of always wanting to rush to the next thing. I am choosing to sit in the darkness and let my eyes adjust to the lack of light. And I am finding that I am not alone here – there are others who have stumbled onto this same path and who could use a friend to sit with them in the dark. Maybe that is the jewel here – to know I am not alone and to help others not feel so alone as well. If that’s the case, I will gladly hurry up and wait.