So many ways to wait. With excitement or dread. With calm or hypervigilance. You might be waiting for a package delivery, the end of an ordeal, or the outcome of a high-stakes contest or medical test. Sometimes in these darker months, I wait with foreboding for the advent of something unspecified, as if the soundtrack of a suspense film were playing in my head.

Like preparation or getting ready, waiting anticipates a future event or change. Unlike preparation, waiting is a state of mind. It’s often most intense when there’s little you can do to prepare.

When waiting grows uncomfortable and refuses to be ignored, the best response depends on circumstance and personality. Here are three of my standbys:

1. Take one preparatory action, just enough to feel agency instead of victimhood. The trick is to keep it small enough not to slip into obsession.
2. Commit to something demanding and all-engrossing that has nothing to do with the object of waiting. I moved house during the 2016 election, leaving no time to fret.
3. Observe with curiosity. This is one of my favorites. It allows me to couple fascination with detachment, as though I were watching a movie or creating a documentary.

Image: Photograph by Suganth on Unsplash.

“It is what it is,” I often say in acknowledgment and regret. Whether or not I might influence the future, I can’t change the past. Friends startle me when they say tautologies aren’t helpful. Why won’t they try to accept the things they cannot change?

Then I recall a time in my teens when I told my father about an event that distressed me. I don’t remember what it was. What I remember is my anger at his response: “It happens.” Feeling dismissed, I fired back, “Of course it happens. Everything that happens, happens. Does that mean we’re never allowed to be upset?”

Gradually I’m absorbing that people need to process whatever feelings they feel, each in their own fashion, at whatever length they must. Someone in grief or shock may need to tell their story again and again, not to convey the facts but to process and feel heard. I’m learning to listen with more patience.

​Of course, if their repetitive woe is about a coffee stain on the carpet, sooner or later I’ll tune out. It is what it is.

Image: Photo by Christian Allard on Unsplash.

How did we get so polarized? My perspective gained from a Politico interview of Jon Grinspan, author of The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought To Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 (Bloomsbury, 2021). I haven’t read the book, but here’s my understanding. The period after the Civil War shared many features with our own: rapid demographic and technological change, high immigration, growing economic disparities, and racial and political violence. A pitched battle in 1874 temporarily overthrew the government of Louisiana. Presidents were fatally shot after the elections of 1880 and 1900.

By the mid-1900s, the U.S. settled into a degree of consensus on overall policies and decorum in sorting out the details. Members of Congress spoke of “my friend across the aisle” without irony. Politics joined sex and religion as private matters to avoid in casual conversation. This public civility came at a price. As passions eased, voter turnout fell sharply, especially among the poor and marginalized. Civility favors the status quo. 

Three takeaways stick with me​:

1. No political culture is perfect. There are always tradeoffs.
2. Strident political affiliation can offer a sense of identity. Hunger to belong increases as groups such as churches, unions, and bowling leagues decline.
3. As to the societal culture wars, politics reflects trends more than it shapes them. “The electoral system is good at putting people in power to pass or block legislation. It’s terrible at deciding what pronouns we should use or whatever,” Grinspan said. “It’s just not designed for what we’re asking it to do for us.

Image: President Grover Cleveland on the $1000 bill (discontinued). Elected in 1884 and 1892, Cleveland was the only previous president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

A truck filled with tennis balls overturned on our road last month, or so it appears. The thousands of green spheres littering our pavement and lawns actually dropped from common black walnut trees, native to North America. Removing the thick hull reveals a shell much tougher than those of English walnuts you find in grocery stores. If you manage to crack the shell, you’ll finally get down to the earthy, robust, slightly bitter meat, a luxury ingredient for baking.

If you leave the green balls where they fall, they will crunch under your tires and threaten your lawnmower blades. As they rot and mold, they will leave black stain on whatever they touch. A few will grow into majestic shade trees, with roots that poison the soil under the branches so nothing else can grow there.

​Is it a waste of nature’s edible bounty to rake them up for compost? Most would say no; the cost in labor outweighs the benefit in flavor. For a few rare souls, processing black walnuts by hand is worth the trouble. If they enjoy it, the laborious task becomes part of the benefit. As people who love to knit elaborate sweaters or make fine furniture can attest, major efforts don’t always pay for themselves in terms of dollars and cents, but by the creative satisfaction that comes from both process and product.

Lawn decorations of skeletons and gravestones are starting to come down. Election campaign yard signs may soon follow suit, and with luck the deluge of political emails and texts will ease. Plants are dying; trees are shedding their leaves. It’s the spooky season, the time between harvest and winter when darkness is closing in. In a modern tweak on an ancient observance, the end of Daylight Savings Time drives the point home.

Early Christians venerated their martyrs in a variety of local observances on sundry dates. Over time they added non-martyred saints and eventually all the dead in heaven. In the 700s, Pope Gregory III fixed All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 for all of Western Christendom, to coincide with the dedication of a chapel to “All the Saints” in Saint Peter’s in Rome.

With the day before (All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween) and the day after (All Souls’ Day, for the dead still in purgatory), this observance of the darkening time absorbed or inspired Samhain in Ireland and the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Whether in remembrance of the saints, celebration of the ancestors, or terror of ghosts, death at this season takes center stage.

It’s not entirely coincidence that Election Day falls so soon after Halloween. Using the authority given it by Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, Congress in 1845 set the date for federal elections as the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. Most voters were farmers, who often lived a distance from their polling places. By early November the harvest was done, and the weather was still mild enough for travel. When Nov. l fell on a Tuesday, voting would take place a week later so as not to conflict with All Saints’ Day.

As for whether to approach Election Day with celebration or fingernail-biting fear, let alone metaphors of darkening and death, I leave it to you to decide.

Image: The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel.

​          A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
          Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
          Mother of Exiles. . . .
                   “. . . Give me your tired, your poor,
          Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”
                      - Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

In the late 1960s I spent a year on a high plateau seven thousand feet above the Red Sea. For most of a century, goods shipped from Europe had passed from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea (and on to Asia) by way of the Suez Canal. Unfortunately for us, the canal had been closed in 1967 as a result of Egyptian/Israeli war and would not re-open until 1975. Our supplies came by the long route around the southern tip of Africa.

Had I visited the nonfunctioning Suez Canal—there was no reason to do so—one thing I would not have seen was a colossal figure of a draped woman holding a torch aloft. French sculptor Auguste Bartholi had intended it to stand at the northern entry to the canal, which opened in 1869. He showed his design, called “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia,” to the Egyptian viceroy Ismail Pasha. However, already deep in debt on the canal project, Egypt rejected the plan for reasons of cost.

Seeking another buyer, Bartholi tweaked his design to appeal to Americans. The title changed to “Liberty Enlightening the World.” The flowing robes of an Egyptian peasant became the garb of a Roman goddess. After mixed reviews, private appeals raised enough donations in France for the statue and in the United States for the pedestal, which cost nearly as much. Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” as part of the fundraising effort. Best known as the Statue of Liberty, the ”mighty woman with a torch” was dedicated in New York Harbor on October 28, 1886. The opening of Ellis Island six years later to process arrivals from Europe made Lady Liberty a symbol of welcome to tired, poor immigrants for all time.

Images, cropped: (left) Bartholi’s design for “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia; (right) the Statue of Liberty.

Once upon a time, a boy sat before a plate piled high with his favorite foods. Large bowls of the same foods and more were strewn across the table. He stuffed forkful after forkful into his mouth at first, relishing every bite. When his plate was half empty, his glee faded. At three quarters empty, he burst into tears.

Asked the problem, he replied, “My plate is almost empty, and my stomach is almost full. Soon it will all be gone. Even with serving dishes all around, I won’t be able to enjoy another bite.”

I first heard this tale on the last evening of a summer camp, when teens were fretting over having to leave the next day. They’d had a magical week, making new friends in a safe new setting where no one knew their baggage and they felt free to be themselves. The camp director reminded them the week was not over yet. If they could dry their tears for now, hours of delight still lay ahead.

It’s natural to grieve the pending death of a loved one after a terminal diagnosis. It’s natural to grieve the imminent loss of a house that’s been home for thirty years. But to become grumpy halfway through a vacation because the vacation will end is worse than useless. I don’t know where and how to draw the line. I do know that more joy is here for the taking than we sometimes remember to take.

Image: Chinese banquet in a banquet hall (cropped).

It’s getting to be high season for fall conferences, meetings, and book launches. Pet peeve: events that start with an announcement of disappointment that so few people chose to attend. What a downer! The only people to hear it are those who did show up. Low attendance is hardly their fault. The message is that they don’t count, or at best they are insufficient.

​You don’t have to believe everything happens for a purpose in order to suggest that the number in the room or on screen is exactly the right number, with exactly the right people. Make it part of your quickly revised plan. Move the chairs closer. Adopt a more conversational style. Take advantage of  the intimacy instead of bemoaning it. Dinner with close friends can be as meaningful as a banquet. When attendees feel honored to get up close and enjoy individual attention for their questions or comments, they’re more likely to leave on a high.

Duty is not a word to fill me with joy and sunshine. Like work, it conjures up doing what’s obligatory rather than fun. Granted, I dislike some duties and enjoy others; the same holds for work. But as a guiding life principle, duty—or dharma—attracts me far less than love and compassion, or even curiosity.

I’ve been watching a lecture series on mythologies, including the Bhagavad Gita. In it, Krishna teaches a prince about dharma, the imperative to do one’s duty according to one’s place in society, without investment in the results. Our related “let it go” and “accept the things I cannot change” remind me how little my strivings can achieve. Dharma goes one step further: Do the right thing without striving toward any goal. Just do it.

My vote won’t swing the upcoming election, but voting is my dharma as a citizen. When my close friend pleads for advice I’m sure she won’t follow, my dharma as a friend is to treat her with love and respect. Instead of debating whether I’m bound by a promise to one now dead who won’t know, to stay bound is my dharma as part of a society that honors promises.

Of course, results do matter. I wouldn’t call doing laundry or dishes part of my dharma if they never come clean. And it will matter how the election comes out, and whether my friend finds comfort in her troubles. Stress hormones of caring can energize and motivate. But tight shoulders and knots in the stomach can also paralyze. I’m little use to anyone when I’m paralyzed by anticipating ends beyond my control. I wouldn’t choose dharma as a guiding life principle, but at the moment it’s a useful tool to have in my toolbox.

Image: Krishna and Arjun on the chariot, Mahabharata, 18th-19th century, India.

Last week we switched the thermostat from “cool” to “heat.” Not because the equinox is behind us, not because the calendar says it’s almost October, but because the house was cold.

In Chicago, landlords must ensure habitable spaces are at least 68 degrees warm from September 15 till June 1, or “heat season.” If you’re chilly Sept 12, tough luck. Last I knew, the U.S. Army required soldiers to change between summer and winter uniforms on specified dates, weather be damned.

Individuals and cultures have different preferences between rigidity/order and flexibility/chaos. Some parents tuck toddlers into bed at eight, others when they act overtired and cranky. But an additional factor shapes whether turn-of-the-year shifts depend more on calendar or weather.

How close is the person who reaps the benefit to the one who bears the cost or risk? If you swap out summer for winter wear in your closet, no one else cares. On the other hand, the landlord who pays the heating bill may never have met the shivering tenant. The same question fits non-seasonal issues too, but that’s for another day.