The Weight of Waiting

There is a particular stillness that belongs only to the young. It is not the stillness of peace, but of suspension. When you are small, the world is a series of rooms you are not yet allowed to enter, or tasks you are not yet old enough to perform. You sit. You watch the dust motes dance in the slivers of light. You wait for the signal that your time has arrived, that the heavy machinery of adulthood has finally made space for you. It is a lonely kind of patience, heavy with the scent of metal and the distant hum of things you do not yet understand. We spend our entire lives trying to recover this capacity to simply be, to exist in the margins of someone else’s labor, before the clock begins to demand our own movement. Does the boy know that he is currently the center of the world, or is he merely counting the seconds until he is called away?

Keith Goldstein has captured this quiet suspension in his image titled Boy On Car Seat. It is a reminder of the spaces we occupy while the world turns around us. What are you waiting for today?