Posted by Elizabeth

If I had to assign one word to my life these days, it would be this:

Waiting.

I can’t tell you what I’m waiting on.  Not just yet.  But suffice it to say that I’m playing The Waiting Game, a game I absolutely hate playing.  All of us play The Waiting Game at one time or another, and from what I’ve observed, some of us are much better at it than others.  As I’ve written before, I am a terribly impatient person, and since waiting and patience go hand in hand, I’m not very good at waiting, either.  I envy those who are able to take waiting with a grain of salt, focusing their minds on present concerns while the future waits (patiently) in the wings.  Normally fairly skilled at attending to what’s right in front of me, everything I’ve learned about living a life in pencil flies out the door when it comes to waiting.  Instead of moving through my life with zen-like flow, the days run dark and slow as molasses.  Instead of enjoying the freedom of idle time, I find myself nervous and antsy, watching the hands on the clock sluggishly drag themselves around the dial.  I’m not using my time:  I’m killing it, biding it, filling it.  The funny thing is, it’s these periods of waiting that have the most to teach us about life in pencil, but it’s also the times in which these lessons become most difficult to learn.

The best way I know how to play The Waiting Game is by throwing myself into a good book, because nothing makes the hours slip by quicker.  Needless to say, I’ve read more books in the past few weeks than I read in the second half of 2009.  I recently finished Jeannette Walls’ Half Broke Horses, her follow-up book to The Glass Castle, one of my all-time favorite books and memoirs.  Described as a “true-life novel,” Half Broke Horses sets the stage for The Glass Castle, providing the backstory to Walls’ topsy-turvy childhood by relaying the life story of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, an incredibly adventurous woman who led an incredibly adventurous life.  During a time when women’s occupational aspirations where limited to secretary, nurse, or schoolteacher, Smith found employment as a mustang breaker, ranch wife, maid, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider, bush pilot — and a schoolteacher (though not all at once).  If I could pick a Life in Pencil posterchild for this insufferable period of waiting, Lily Casey Smith would be it.  Here’s what I learned about living life in pencil from Lily Casey Smith – even in the midst of my own waiting, when the lessons are so difficult to learn:

1. When one door closes a window opens – but it’s your job to find the window. A nun at the Sisters of Loretto in Santa Fe, NM, gives teenage Lily this advice when her dad loses the money for her final year of school tuition, which would have enabled her to graduate and realize her dream of becoming a schoolteacher.  There are many ways to get to where you’re going; if you want it bad enough, keep searching for the window. 

2. When a plan stops working, do something else.  Most people stay in losing situations far too long. During the Depression, Lily gets into the bootleg business to make ends meet.  Business is booming until someone she refuses to sell liquor to reports her to the sheriff, and she narrowly escapes arrest.  Even though she’s desperate for the money, she realizes the opportunity has run its course and it’s time to get out the bootleg business.  It’s always difficult to walk away from “sure things,” even when they cease to become the “sure thing” we’ve always considered it to be. 

3. Always be scanning the environment for opportunities, looking ahead, anticipating.  Although she’s from a family of horse people, she learns to drive a car when she can see that automobiles are the future of transportation.  When everyone is selling their cattle during the Depression, Lily and her husband buy extra heads for their ranch at bargain-basement prices, knowing things will eventually turn around.  Sometimes living in the future can be a good thing.

4. Doggedly pursue anything that really matters to you, even if it takes a lifetime to achieve it. Many years and miles down the road, Lily eventually realizes her dream of becoming a teacher.  It doesn’t happen in any conventional way – she works as an itinerant schoolteacher in some of the most poor, rural communities in the West and works her way piecemeal through high school and college in order to earn her teaching certificate.  But she experiences a boatload of adventures along her unusual path.

5. Balance mystery and excitement with pragmatism. While Lily’s life is colored with risk-taking, dramatic episodes, and close brushes with danger, she maintains a surprising degree of level-headed coolness.  She is a calculated risk-taker, with an intimate sense of which risks are worth taking and which ones aren’t.  She is skilled at determining when the risks outweigh the benefits, and when it’s worth jumping in head first and seeing what happens.

And I can tell you this:  Lily Casey Smith was an exceedingly patient person.  She waited half of her lifetime to become a teacher, and didn’t spend a lot of time moaning about it in the meantime.  She pursued other adventures while she waited for her window of opportunity, because half the battle of living a life in pencil is waiting for the timing to be right.

Are you patient or impatient when it comes to waiting?  How do you handle The Waiting Game?  What sorts of things get your mind off whatever you’re waiting for?