Waiting for the Moment

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”
- Paul McCartney

I’ve always heard that the song from which I quoted above was about freedom… sort of a response to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s from the band that seemed to rule the later part of that decade. Of course, I’ve also heard that it is based in Egyptian mythology’s battle between Horus and Set. And then, lest I forget, I have heard that it is purely satanic in origin, and relative only to Lucifer himself. For the record, Paul McCartney always said it was about civil rights. But what does he know. He just wrote the stuff, right?
As I was going through some photographs taken earlier this year, this one caught my eye. And after pondering it for a minute or two, the song started playing in my head. And after the song started playing, I fit myself and my photograph into McCartney’s lyric, seemingly having waited all my life for that moment to arise only then to see the warning that the blackbird sits atop, the contradiction of the lyric with the sign’s warning slowly turning the rusted cogs of my brain. It seems that we (or perhaps just I) spend a great deal of life waiting. I know… I’ve written of waiting before, but it persists.
Every day for the past few months, I started my day by looking at my wall calendar and counting the months, weeks and days until I can retire. When I moved to my new office last week, I shredded my calendar. I found that it was no more than a monument to my own infinite impatience. After all, once I get past those months, weeks and days, what will I do then?
I don’t know. To borrow a statement from the William Feather Magazine,

“Too many of us wait to do the perfect thing, with the result we do nothing. The way to get ahead is to start now. While many of us are waiting until conditions are “just right” before we go ahead, others are stumbling along, fortunately ignorant of the dangers that beset them. By the time we are, in our superior wisdom, decided to make a start, we discover that those who have gone fearlessly on before, have, in their blundering way, traveled a considerable distance. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don’t know now, and that you will not know next year, if you wait.”

Most of the time, I just think that I think too much. A perfect example of why brains should all come with an ‘off’ switch.
Or maybe it’s just me.

Peace and prayers.

“I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then – I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn’t luckily have to bother about that.” – Agatha Christie

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell

“As of today, I have 14 months, two weeks and four days to go. But I’m not counting.” – Jeff Jeter