Stand in line.

I went to the DMV this morning to get my license renewed. Online it said it was a 14 minute wait at the Glendale DMV. I thought I had struck the DMV motherlode of no waiting. Can you feel what’s coming next? Yeah, 1 hour and 42 minutes later after standing in a line that literally circumnavigated the entire building, I finally walked through the door.

Yet I regress; about 50 minutes into my sojourn on the Glendale Riviera I struck up a conversation with the masked pilgrim next to me. He said something quite extraordinary. The second sentence out of his mouth was “A lot of people couldn’t stand in line for this long. They just can’t do it. No one can stand still anymore.” Whoa… dude just nailed that. With a cinematic double take I had to make sure that wasn’t the Dalai Lama under that florescent green mask spewing mad knowledge. He’s right. A lot of people don’t like stillness of any kind… standing still, sitting still, energetic stillness like meditating or, I’m gonna say it, quiet. In our entertainment culture there’s no room for “the space between the notes”. We leave to take a walk and jam our earbuds into our skull to drowned out the world, inside as well as out. We grab our phones when we’re uncomfortable or don’t want to deal with what’s in front of us. We’re conditioned to plug in instead of unplug. There’s a lot to be learned in “the space between”. In the stillness. Standing in line.

It’s the interval between events where we meet ourselves. Maybe a lot of us can’t stand still because we don’t want to meet ourselves. It can be a lot. Sit still for 5 minutes today without distraction. Put the phone in the other room and “stand in line”. The truth is right in front you. Take it from the Buddha dude at the DMV. He stood in line like a champ.