January 31
They also serve who only stand and wait. / God does not need your works, nor your haste — / whoever bears his lot with patience serves him best.
On His Blindness (freely rendered)
Listening mode
They also serve who only stand and wait. / God does not need your works, nor your haste — / whoever bears his lot with patience serves him best.
When something hard happens to someone close to you, you want to do something almost at once. You offer to do the shopping, to take over the phone calls, to cook something. Some of this genuinely helps. Some of it helps mainly you: a task gives your helplessness a shape you can deal with.
It gets harder when there is nothing to be done. You sit with them, and the other person wants neither to talk nor to be looked after. Then your presence quickly seems like too little, almost as if you had to justify it. And yet it may be exactly what they cannot ask you for.
The uncomfortable part is that you never find out whether it was. A finished errand can be ticked off. No one tells you whether your staying meant anything. You would have to do it without knowing whether it counts.
At some point you get up to make tea. Perhaps because they'd like some. Perhaps, too, because at last you have something in your hands again.
