The query had been running for forty minutes when I opened my Bible. I don’t usually do this — flip pages while a process bar drifts forward — but the office was quiet and the cursor was blinking and I had read every other tab twice.
Psalm 130. Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice. The psalmist, it seems, also knew what it was to wait.
The garbage collector
A long-running query is a small thing to be patient about. Most of the people I admire have waited for harder things — a child to come home, a diagnosis to lift, a calling to clarify. But the small impatiences are the ones I notice in myself. Forty minutes against an empty afternoon and I am a man with a stopwatch in his soul.
The runtime, meanwhile, is doing something I should respect: it is sweeping memory. Holding the heap still while it walks the graph of what is reachable, marking the live cells, freeing the rest. Mark and sweep. It is, if you will indulge me, an examination of conscience.
What is reachable from here? What is still alive?
Restless hearts
Augustine has a line every Christian writer eventually quotes: fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
I have been thinking about that word requiescat. It is the same root as requiescat in pace — rest in peace. Augustine is not asking for a hammock. He is asking for the kind of stillness that lets a heart stop running queries against itself.
The bar finishes. The result set lands. I close the Bible, mark the result for review, and notice that I am no longer in a hurry.