Until recently I had no idea just what I had riding on my knees. In a brief episode, recently, I realized that I was.
I reflect today on an injured knee. For a day or so last week I couldn’t bend it without pain. That’s when accepting things as they are can be daunting. An injured meniscus, although painful, is common and easily treatable. The mishap led me to reflect on infirmities and particularly about the work of our bodies.
Of the emotional chords any infirmity may strike, whether it’s from a transient injury or a loss, I expect to feel anger, fear, pain and the emptiness of loss. I’ve discovered another chord. It’s the one that strikes when we are forced to wait.
In my profession, the bended knee is regarded as an act of reverence or humility. When it doesn’t bend easily, my humility goes out the window and I just get mad. It’s kind of crazy when I think of how I’m angry because I can’t demonstrate humility or show sufficient reverence. However, I’ve learned something about the business of waiting. It was during the days after the pain of the injured meniscus appeared and my knee took me to the emergency room, then to doctors and subsequently kept me off my feet for a few days.
I first arrived at the emergency room at 4:00 in the afternoon and was discharged at 8:30. I was treated kindly and well. For me, the essence of the experience was about waiting.
On a subsequent visit to a doctor, the waiting room was filled. The tone was subdued. Some people spoke softly as they do in churches or at funerals and most patients remained anesthetized by their cell phones, the anodyne of the twenty-first century.
By definition, a patient is one who suffers and endures it without complaint. One patient in the waiting room that day didn’t know that. He complained, and vociferously at that.
“I’ve had it” he roared full bore so everyone in the room couldn’t help hearing him. “I’m tired of all this f…king waiting, tired of doctors, tired of this sh..tty wheel chair. This is it!” he declared defiantly, but triumphantly. “No more just hurrying up to wait. F..k that!” He then settled back to waiting. Whether the doctor or even heaven heard his complaint I don’t know, but everyone in the room did. I’ll bet what the man said that day in the waiting room everyone also thought but hadn’t heard it expressed quite so graphically. He captured the collective mood, that unique burden that waiting places on each of us.
There, the passing moments were less about pain and restricted mobility, and more of waiting. Most of our lives are spent in some form of waiting. We live in a perpetual state of what’s next. I’ve noticed that in muffler shops or emergency rooms, at car dealers or restaurants, and in waiting areas of all kinds, the ubiquitous television sits in the corner. We can’t be left alone with our thoughts. Heaven forbid what may arise in an undistracted mind.
Opioids spare us the intensity of physical pain while we wait. Psychotropic drugs can limit mental suffering as we learn to live less fearfully. Food can feed empty souls and broken hearts as well as empty stomachs, but people fleeing life with calories or other anodynes are never sated. Waiting is the art of accommodating the rises and falls of everyday experience. Doing it well requires practice.
It’s hard to wait when the heart is feeling fearful, bored, restless, angry and unsure. It’s hard to wait when we’re in pain. The community emergency room is the one crucible in our community (including summer beach traffic on route 50) in which our capacity for patience is fully challenged.
Patience is not the hallowed virtue it once was. Contemporary culture abhors vacuums of any kind, especially the kind involved in waiting. Of the heavenly virtues, patience lists fifth. Among contemporary virtues, for all practical purposes, it’s extinct.
I’ve been meditating off and on over the years. One form of meditation is called the “walking meditation.” It requires me to take exceedingly slow steps, while during each step staying aware of the earth’s feel underfoot. When I tried this, I’d always feel driven to walk faster, as if I needed to hurry up to get somewhere, but where? I didn’t know, but only that I had to hurry. I grew bored and restless with the slow stride and turned my time of reflection into a call to action.
Now my knee is such that I dare not walk quickly for the fear of aggravating the injury and the leg collapsing. I’ve been forced back to basics and obliged to practice patience, which I now understand includes the art of waiting. Waiting may well be fundamental to the art of living. It’s a sad commentary on my capacity for gratitude. When my body serves me faithfully I take it for granted and don’t give it a thought. When it lets me down I feel angry at the discomforts and also put upon for all the waiting and inconveniences that I am obliged to endure as a result of its malfunctions.
It never occurred to me until just last week that those two relatively small joints appearing halfway down my legs had been holding me up for my entire walking life. I was a knee jerk; too busy rushing here and there to give them a single thought.
These circumstances have led me to another place, back to the “walking meditation.” I have discovered great comfort in it, not the kind that the rapid pace had for me in the past – that was more about achievement and conquest and being on the go – but now I can feel in greater depth what a simple joy it is to walk and feel the earth beneath my foot – the earth just as it is without making more of it than sensing its contours rising to meet my sole.
In an epic statement about the significance of waiting, the poet John Milton wrote this as he struggled to come to terms with his infirmity, a lifetime of blindness: “They also serve, who only stand and wait.”
I would add only if standing and waiting, is out of the question, sitting will do.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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