Waiting is all around us, if we stop and pay attention. That’s one reason I love this time of year.

We’re not used to waiting. A few days ago a Wal-Mart employee on Long Island was stampeded to death by impatient shoppers.

As a child, I associated Advent with the stiff, single-sheeted Advent Calendars my mother would prop up on the kitchen counter. My brother and I would push aside our cereal bowls and find the tab marked with the date, pull it back to reveal a small drawing: a pomegranate, a rag doll, a cat with a red bow around its neck (something our cats would never have put up with).

Over the weeks, more and more dates would be opened until the 24th, when the scored tabs pulled back on both sides, like a window, to reveal the baby in the manger under the bright star. No one ever explained to me why the Advent calendar ended on 24 when the “real” calendar gave December its full 31, but no one ever needed to. It made sense. On the 24th, after all, once the creche was uncovered, the waiting was over.

I had a friend in elementary school named Karen. She lived four houses away from us on a street otherwise inhabited by an unlikely number of retired Navy admirals. Karen climbed trees and rode horses. I stayed inside and read books. Together, we had a blast. We watched Lost in Space and listened to Peter Paul and Mary and played with plastic horses and taped fortunes with dirty words onto plain fortune cookies we sold from a card table to unsuspecting passers-by.

After her parents split, Karen came to town every few months to see her father – and stop by to see us. One year, she visited on a Tuesday, the day of my piano lesson. I woke that morning thinking “today Karen is coming!” The school day passed in a blur. Usually I walked home from my piano lesson, taking my time as long as I got there by dinner, but that Tuesday, my mother picked me up so I’d be home in time to see Karen.

I don’t remember the lesson. I don’t remember my mother picking me up. I don’t remember Karen’s arrival, or what we did when she arrived. What I remember is the waiting: the delicious tingle of anticipation as I walked through my piano teacher’s yard to his house, where the side-by-side pianos waited. I remember the bay trees growing on either side of the walkway, the slight incline of a pebbled path up to his back door, the wall of windows overlooking the trees and hidden from the street below. I noticed the splotching of shadow at my feet; the way the fragrance of the bay trees was stronger at the bend in the path than on the straightaway.

It’s been several years since I’ve seen Karen, and when I think of her I remember the mischievous twinkle in her eyes when she grinned; the shelves in her bedroom where she kept her plastic horses; the turntable on which we played “Lemon Tree” and “Puff the Mighty Dragon” over and over. I recall our long confidences once we became teenagers, about the boys we kissed and the boys we wanted to kiss. But, no matter which detail I latch on, all of them are suffused with the power of that three-minute walk up my piano teacher’s path, that power of waiting.

For the past seven years, I’ve spent some time each Advent on silent retreat in Sonoma County, where the landscape seems to shine with waiting: vineyards wrapped in fog; plump persimmons hanging heavy off boughs; overnight frost on the path to breakfast delineating each vein on a fallen oak leaf.

The first few years I went on this retreat, I stayed only two or three nights; the silence felt strange—cozy but odd, too, especially during the meals when I stared at my food and tried not to make eye contact with the other retreatants. But then the silence began to expand, as I found myself falling into it with a surrender I had not known myself capable of. I stopped waiting for the bell to ring for breakfast, and again for lunch; I stopped waiting for dusk, my favorite time of day to go for a long walk. I stopped planning out my day. I started noticing the slant of light through the redwoods, the rustle of the birds in the hedge outside the window, the taste of the communion wine every day at 11:30 mass. I was still waiting, but I was resting in the waiting—enjoying it as palpably as I had enjoyed it that Tuesday afternoon when Karen came to visit.

Yes, in theory I could do this all year long—but I don’t. So this year, as another Advent begins, I give thanks for what the liturgical season calls us to.