Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

Hello, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good night. Wherever you are in the world. Good I.

It's so wonderful to see you all here. I love you. And I've been sitting here in a chair waiting to see you.

And then waiting for 100 people to shop on Facebook, which is how I know to begin. It's like a Pavlovian response.

And I just, I was thinking about this today and I thought, I've been waiting a lot lately.

Now, if you tune in regularly, you know I've been going

on and on and on about my book proposal and having to, like, audio, record the audio of a different

book and weird things are happening with rights and movie rights and foreign rights. And there's a lot,

there's a period where you're working really hard

and then there's a period i think almost any anything you do there's a period where you have to wait

like watching the great british baking show they're doing things they're doing things they're doing

things then they shove it in the oven and they just wait and And you can see the agony of the weight. Or,

you know, on the Olympics, the ice skaters go out and then they have to go sit and wait for the

scores. And they're in public and there are cameras on them. And it's like waiting is one of the

most horrific experiences you can have. I hate it. And lately, I am waiting for so many things

that I have been waking up in the middle of the night to wait harder, to wait more actively.

I just lie there waiting, thinking, I don't want to be waiting. Why don't I go to sleep? Because I'm

waiting. So I went, I did a little dive into the topic of waiting

today. I was thinking about what am I waiting for? Yes, for certain things to happen, but then

they happen and it's either no big deal or you're just waiting for another thing to happen.

I remember waiting to grow up.

Lila's only two, our little one, and she's already waiting for Christmas. Somehow she knows to wait for

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