Patience

There was a time, when I was young and impatient, not that I�m any more patient now than then, my theory being that one�s character traits become more pronounced with age, impatience being one of mine, when I suddenly let it all go, like Atlas giving up the weight of the sky to Hercules so that he could merrily skip off to retrieve the golden apples of the Hesperides. It was as though the passage of time was a good and natural thing, not a river to be harnessed or dammed to produce energy to grind grain into grist or process trees into lumber, but instead an unresistable force to give in to and be swept up in.

I have always been an uptight person, the exemplar of a Type A personality, tight of jaw, stiff of neck and shoulder, a watcher of clocks and a tapper of feet. Always punctual for appointments, intolerant of those who are not, it was a very strange thing when this �letting go� occurred. What prompted my entering a state of transient Zen is not important, although it seemed at some point that I just relaxed and ceased to let the irritations of life abrade me. Instead they just flowed along, like the river I no longer tried to harness.

I was 19 or 20, in between high school and university, working as a legal secretary in downtown Toronto. I had a boyfriend with whom I was head-over-heels in love, a pre-med student who had been a close friend in high school, but who had watched painfully from his role as �best guy friend� while I dated everyone but him. My mother had been in Israel visiting my brother, something she did almost every year, and I conceived the plan to meet her plane when it arrived at the airport. She was the only driver in the family at that time, so my boyfriend and I took the airport bus and waited in the arrivals lounge for her.

As we waited, the sense of calm upon me was never disturbed. We watched as many planeloads of people came through the glass doors and were greeted by loved ones. Travelers from India in saris and kurtas did namastes, there were hugs and kisses, tears of joy and laughter. I could have watched all night. My mother, however, was not among the arrivals. My boyfriend was anxious, even though I was not. Upon calling home, my father informed me that my mother had caught on earlier flight and was already asleep in bed, jet lag having gotten the better of her. So my boyfriend and I retraced our steps, our mission thwarted.

He probably saw the evening as having been a waste of time, and perhaps it was, perhaps he had other things he could have been doing instead of waiting around at an airport for a woman who never showed up. Certainly there was a sense of disappointment, of futility even, that we had attempted a fine and considerate thing and were left emptyhanded, that we had not been able to see the surprise and gratitude and unexpected joy on my mother�s face, she who always claimed that no one ever met her at the airport.

All those things were true and undeniable, but in the state I had attained for that brief time of my life, they were immaterial. Instead, I had spent several hours with a person I loved deeply, watching the reunions of other lovers and family members. While I hadn�t been able to greet my own mother, I had observed others greeting theirs with the same depth of emotion I would have experienced. At that time, in that pocket of transcendence that I then occupied, it was enough. It was meet.

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