There was a morning, not long ago, when I realized I was not waiting for anything.
Not waiting for the children to wake up. Not waiting for the email. Not waiting for the contract or the renewal or the decision about next term. Not waiting for the noise to start or the quiet to end. Just in the morning, in the kitchen, with the light doing what the morning light does in October, and the house quiet, and nothing pending.
I stood there for a moment and took an inventory.
Was I lonely. No. Not this morning. The quiet was not the hollow kind, not the quiet that calls attention to what is missing, not the silence that knows its own shape too well. It was the other kind. The full kind. The kind that is available only to a person who has been quiet enough, long enough, to understand that quiet is not the absence of company but a kind of presence in itself, its own companion, its own particular and reliable arrival every morning if you have learned to receive it.
I made coffee and I went to the window.
The neighbour’s cat was doing the thing it does on the fence post, that particular feline combination of complete stillness and total alertness that I have been trying to learn from for months and have not yet mastered. The light was the specific October light that will be different in November and is not available in any other month and I was there for it, present for it, not planning or managing or preparing but actually in it, the way you are only actually in a moment when you have stopped trying to get past it to the next one.
This is what I worked for, I thought.
Not the career, though the career was real and I do not regret it. Not the title or the publications or the years of demonstrated competence. This. The morning in the kitchen with the October light and the cat on the fence post and the coffee and the quiet and nobody needing anything from me and me needing nothing from the moment except to be in it.
This is what I was working toward the whole time, even when I did not know it.
It took a long time. It was worth it. I am here.
