“Rule your mind or it will rule you.” ~Buddha
Some mornings I wake before dawn and lie still, listening for signs that the house is awake.
A cough down the hallway.
The sound of a drawer opening.
Water running softly in the kitchen sink.
My mother is ninety-seven years old now, and before my feet even touch the floor, part of me is already listening for proof that the world has not changed overnight.
When I hear movement, I exhale.
Only then do I reach for my phone.
I tell myself I’m just checking messages. But lately I’ve realized I am usually checking for something else entirely.
Relief.
An email from an editor. A response about work. A call. An opportunity. Some sign that the future is still opening rather than slowly narrowing.
Usually there is nothing.
Or almost nothing.
Spam. A medical reminder. A discount offer. Silence disguised as activity.
One morning recently, I stood in the kitchen refreshing my inbox while my coffee cooled untouched beside me. I had already checked several times before sunrise. I knew there was no reason to look again. Still, my thumb pulled downward automatically, as if certainty might finally appear if I repeated the motion enough times.
Refresh.
Nothing.
Refresh.
Nothing.
Outside, the world remained completely ordinary. A neighbor walked a dog. A car door shut somewhere down the street. Light slowly entered the room.
But inside me, something was tightening.
I have never been good at waiting. Not ordinary waiting. Not lines or traffic or delayed appointments. I mean the deeper kind—the waiting that depends on forces you cannot control.
Waiting for medical tests.
Waiting to see whether your body will worsen or stabilize.
Waiting beside old age.
Waiting for the phone to ring.
Waiting for someone to answer with the same energy you brought to them.
Waiting to know whether your work, your voice, or even your presence still matters in the world.
And beneath all of it, the waiting we rarely admit aloud:
Waiting for loss.
The strange thing about waiting is that nothing appears to be happening from the outside, yet internally it can consume entire days.
The mind fills silence with interpretation.
Maybe they aren’t interested.
Maybe I waited too long in life.
Maybe the opportunities are gone now.
Maybe I am becoming invisible.
At some point, waiting stops being about time.
It becomes about worth.
What unsettles me most is not the silence itself but how quickly I abandon the present trying to escape it. My mind races ahead, rehearsing futures that do not yet exist. I imagine illness worsening. Financial collapse. Death. Loneliness. The quiet emptiness that may one day fill this house.
I try to solve tomorrow before today has even arrived.
Buddhism calls this suffering dukkha—the deep unsatisfactoriness of trying to hold still a life that constantly changes. And beneath that suffering is tanha: craving. The desperate wish for certainty, resolution, permanence.
I can feel craving physically.
In the tightening chest. In the restless refreshing of email. In the inability to settle into a single unfinished moment.
The Buddha described five hindrances that cloud the mind, and while waiting, I seem to meet all of them.
Restlessness urges me to check once more.
Doubt whispers that my value depends on being wanted.
Aversion makes me resent silence itself.
Fear projects suffering into futures that have not happened.
And exhaustion quietly asks whether any effort matters anymore.
None of this changes reality. It only pulls me further away from the life unfolding directly in front of me.
One afternoon, after another spiral of checking messages and imagining outcomes, I finally set my phone face down on the table and sat still.
Not peacefully.
Just still.
At first, I noticed the tinnitus.
A thin, continuous ringing in my ears that I usually resist or try to ignore. But over time, through meditation and reading about Nada Yoga—the yogic practice of inner sound—I’ve started relating to it differently. Instead of hearing only irritation, I sometimes hear continuity. A current beneath thought. A reminder that silence is never completely empty.
So I sat there listening.
The ringing.
My breathing.
A bird outside.
The faint sound of my mother moving slowly through the house.
For a few moments, nothing resolved.
The future remained uncertain. The emails unanswered. The body vulnerable. The losses still inevitable. But something softened anyway.
I realized how much of my suffering came not from waiting itself, but from my refusal to let the moment remain unfinished.
I wanted reassurance before living. Certainty before trusting. Guarantees before relaxing into the day.
But life was never offering guarantees.
Only participation.
The Eightfold Path, I’m beginning to understand, is not about transcending ordinary life. It is about learning how to remain present inside it.
Right mindfulness means noticing fear without fully becoming it.
Right effort means gently returning when the mind races toward catastrophe again and again.
Right view means recognizing that impermanence is not a mistake in the system. It is the system.
I still struggle.
Some mornings I wake already anticipating grief before anything bad has even happened. Sometimes I still refresh my inbox too often. Sometimes silence still feels personal. But now there are moments when I stop fighting the unfinished nature of life.
Moments when I simply listen.
To the ringing in my ears. To my own breathing. To the sounds of my mother still alive in the next room.
And slowly, waiting becomes something different.
Not punishment.
Not paralysis.
Practice.
A practice of staying present while the mind begs to escape into certainty.
A practice of realizing that worth cannot depend entirely on responses, recognition, or guarantees about the future.
A practice of remaining here for the fragile life that is already happening.
Happiness still comes and goes for me. But calmness asks less.
It does not require answers. It does not require permanence. It does not even require the waiting to end.
Only attention.
Only presence.
Only the willingness to remain inside this moment before rushing toward the next one.
So these days, when I feel myself reaching again—for reassurance, for resolution, for proof that everything will be okay—I try to pause.
I listen.
The ringing. The breath. The small sounds of life continuing around me.
And for a moment, the silence no longer feels empty.
It feels alive.
About Tony Collins
Edward “Tony” Collins, EdD, MFA, is a documentary filmmaker, writer, educator, and disability advocate living with progressive vision loss from macular degeneration. His work explores presence, caregiving, resilience, and the quiet power of small moments. He is currently completing books on creative scholarship and collaborative documentary filmmaking and shares personal essays about meaning, hope, and disability on Substack. Connect: substack.com/@iefilm | iefilm.com
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