I've had one of those stretches - a run of days that were nothing but errands, customer service holds, and paperwork. Nothing dramatic. Nothing actually wrong. Just more involved than any of it should have been, one call bleeding into the next, one form needing one more signature than expected. I noticed something about myself in the middle of it: I would rather be chased down the street by a rabid fox than decipher and fill one more form or sit through one more phone tree asking me to state, in a few words, the reason for my call. Give me a real problem, a genuine puzzle, a system that needs to be completely reimagined, and I am on it. Give me another hold queue, and I am a puddle.

Sometimes we have to slog through doing the things that we'd rather put off until the day after Jesus returns.

On hold, phone against my ear, there was nothing to do but wait. No way to make the minutes productive (the hold music with interspersed speaking made sure of that.) I couldn't scroll past it or multitask my way through it. I could only stand there and wait.

I dislike that kind of stillness. I would never choose it. Given the option, I fill every open minute with something useful, something that moves. But I've started to notice that the only stillness that actually gets past my defenses lately is the kind I didn't sign up for, the kind that shows up disguised as the most irritating thirty minutes of my day and simply refuses to let me do anything else with it. I haven't protected my quiet time lately. Apparently a hold queue has to do it for me.

I don't think that's an accident, exactly, even if it feels like one. Whatever holds the universe together doesn't seem to need my permission to find a way in, using a phone tree if that's what's available, or a long red light or waiting room. Not because tedium is secretly sacred. It isn't. But stillness has to get in somehow, and most of us have gotten too efficient to leave a door open for it. (Why did I choose to turn off the notifications on my meditation app?)

I still dislike being on hold. That part hasn't changed, and I don't expect it to. But I've started noticing what I'm handed in those minutes instead of only resenting them, thirty seconds where there is, for once, nothing to optimize.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that the next time something forces you to just sit there - hold music, a red light, a line that isn't moving - you'd let it do something you hadn't scheduled for yourself. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa