The Day I Learned to Wait

At Bodhinyanarama, a Buddhist forest monastery near Wellington, I was walking down from my small hut to collect my laundry. The machine had another fifteen or twenty minutes to run. I sat down and waited.

That is the whole event. No teaching was delivered. No great decision announced itself. I did not even choose a particularly noble form of meditation. The laundry was unfinished, and for once I did not need to fill the time before it was ready.

I remember how surprising that felt.

I had come to New Zealand after years of pursuing intensity. I loved mountains, surfing, snowboarding, and the relief of being outdoors. Those were real pleasures, and I still love the mountains. But I had begun to notice a pattern. I could reach a summit, find a beautiful wave, or stand in an alpine meadow and still feel the mind preparing its next request. The experience was good. It just could not do everything I was asking of it.

The same hunger could attach itself to work. I had known the satisfaction of responsibility and advancement in hospitality, and I had also known how quickly a demanding role could consume the hours once given to prayer and yoga. Success did not settle the sense that something was missing. In New Zealand, with a little distance from work, I finally had room to notice it again.

By then I had spent years praying within the Catholic tradition. I went to Mass when I could and prayed the rosary. Christian prayer had brought me moments of love and joy that I would not dismiss. I was also reading Buddhist teachings and trying to understand why a mind could be peaceful one day and restless the next. At the monastery, that inquiry became less theoretical. There was less to do, and less to hide behind.

Waiting for laundry should not have been difficult. In ordinary life, fifteen minutes disappears into a phone, a plan, a conversation, or an errand. Yet I had become so accustomed to treating an interval as a problem that simply sitting there felt almost radical. Nothing needed to improve before I could be at ease. The washing could finish in its own time. I could be present for mine.

I do not want to inflate the moment. It did not cure me of restlessness. I returned to Canada with plenty of it. Later, in religious communities, I found that silence often made my cravings and irritation more obvious rather than less. I left both the Franciscan and Buddhist monastic paths. If the lesson at the laundry had been a permanent achievement, the years that followed would have looked very different.

It was valuable because it showed me a possibility, not because it proved I had mastered it.

I had often thought of freedom as the ability to go where I wished: to surf, hike, travel, choose work, or rearrange my life. Those freedoms matter. But here was a quieter one. I could remain where I was without being pushed by the need for the next thing. For a few minutes, the mind did not treat waiting as deprivation.

The Buddhist tradition gave me language for investigating that shift. It asks us to look closely at craving and at the conditions that strengthen or weaken it. When I remember that afternoon, I do not think the laundry produced peace. Nor do I think I can summon peace by arranging another visit to the same place. I think the monastery offered conditions in which a familiar habit became visible, and for a short time it loosened.

Christian prayer had already taught me that joy need not depend on acquiring something. The monastery let me see the same question from another angle: how much of my unhappiness came from the mind insisting that this moment was insufficient? I am still careful about treating similar experiences as though the traditions therefore mean the same thing. They do not. But both had led me to examine a life organized around wanting more.

During that winter I came to feel that I wanted to return to Canada and give more of my life to service. I went on to spend roughly a year with the Franciscan friars. The move was larger than anything that happened beside a washing machine, yet the small moment has stayed with me. It reminds me that spiritual practice is not always a dramatic vision or a heroic act of renunciation. Sometimes it is the discovery that I can sit down, let a task finish, and stop making the next fifteen minutes an obstacle to happiness.

That discovery remains unfinished. Most days, waiting still feels like waiting. But occasionally I recognize the old demand as it rises: This should be over; something else should begin. Then I remember a quiet place near Wellington, and the possibility that nothing has to happen immediately for this moment to be lived.