On limbo…and other disappointments…
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more ‘gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me – John Borroughs (1837 – 1921)
I spend alot of my life waiting. What I do requires short bursts of energy, a mad rush of learning lyrics and lines, a few minutes of trying to impress an audition panel, showing your worth in one song, one scene, one smile or the raising of an eyebrow. I am required to be performance ready without the benefit of rehearsal, without spending five weeks with the material and director and choreographer and musical director, fleshing out the role, finding the life of the character. I am put there and judged, I put myself to be judged. It is harsh, sometimes unfriendly, a situation over which I have no control. And sometimes it doesn’t work…
So I have received news today that one of the roles that I’ve gone up for did not come my way. The lovely lady who inhabits it has decided to stay on for another year’s contract. I wish her well, and she is fantastic. And it is her job and not anybody else’s to take away. Of course, it raises all the questions about whether they should audition other people for a job that is potentially unavailable…but that is beside the point. And of course I am disappointed, yes I would have liked the opportunity to shake a tail feather or two in that particular musical, to add poignancy to the soul searing song in the second half, to funk and jive in rhyming couplets under the brilliant gaze of the spotlight and the peering eyes of twelve hundred people nightly…but that is not on my journey. I allowed myself a few moments of total self-pitying, and then I shook myself out of it.
Staring into Limbo
not move forward while we await the decisions of others….we’re waiting for a mortgage decision, waiting for the employers to decide if they will give us the job, waiting for a husband to decide if we will go to marriage counselling or not, waiting for a boyfriend to pop the big question, waiting for the gas bill, waiting for the doctor to phone us with those test results, waiting to find out if our friend really did hear us saying that awful gaff that never should have been uttered, waiting to be approved for a loan, waiting for him/ her to call, waiting to find out if we’ve been accepted into that school, waiting to see if we have been found worthy by the standards of others. And what do we do with that waiting? Maybe we exercise patience, that most trying of virtues, the one which sees us outwardly calm, breathing through all our anxieties, quipping those inane phrases such as ‘Whatever will be, will be’, all the while inside we’re a bubbling, churning mess of anxiety and worry, we’re willing away the hours and the minutes, employing our strongest mind power on telephone technology (if we stare at it enough it just might ring), getting down on our knees praying to Jesus/ Buddha/ Zog/ Barack Obama that we will do right by them if only they can manifest this one chance, employing all the secrets of The Secret (or insert other new age-y ‘if you believe, you will receive’ method here), visualising, vision boarding, journalling, keeping fingers crossed, hoping…
And sometimes, we do exhibit real patience and let go of the outcome. And when the outcome manifests itself, in whatever form, we are grateful for the experience, we garner our lessons and we move on, sure of the fact that life will never let up and we will be faced with more excitement, more adventure and we would be foolish not to participate.
I look forward to further surrender…
