Letter No. 17: Twenty Seconds

I was pumping wine at the winery when the power went out.

There was no warning. The pump simply stopped.

For a moment, I stood there listening to the absence of something I had not been listening to a second earlier. The equipment that had been doing exactly what I expected it to do was suddenly doing nothing.

My mind moved much faster than the electricity had.

We have backup generation, so I immediately began working through what would need to happen next. What was running? What needed power first? How long would we be without it? Did I need to stop what I was doing and bring the generator online?

I had barely started down that road when everything came back.

Maybe twenty seconds had passed.

The pump resumed, and I felt an amount of relief completely disproportionate to the length of the interruption. There was something close to elation in hearing the equipment come back to life and watching the work continue.

Twenty seconds earlier, I had not been grateful for electricity.

I had simply expected it.

That caught my attention.

I had plugged the pump into the outlet without a moment of suspense. I had not stood there hoping the electrical grid would fulfill its part of the arrangement.

I expected a response.

We flip a switch and expect light. We turn on a faucet and expect water. We adjust the thermostat and assume something somewhere will begin warming or cooling the air. We plug our phones in before bed and assume that while we sleep, something we cannot see will travel through wires hidden behind the drywall and leave us with charged batteries in the morning.

Most of the time, none of this feels remarkable. Reliability has a strange way of disappearing. The more faithfully something works, the less attention we give it.

When a light comes on ten thousand times, the response eventually stops feeling like a response at all. It simply becomes what happens next.

That twenty-second interruption made me realize that every expectation has a history. I trusted the power because it had answered before, one ordinary response at a time.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter ways we are formed. What happens repeatedly teaches us what to expect, and once something becomes dependable enough, we begin arranging other parts of our lives around it.

I had tanks of wine, pumps, equipment, and a day’s work organized around the assumption that when I needed electricity, electricity would be there. I had made plans based on a reliability I almost never consciously acknowledged.

Something similar happens in our relationships, although I do not want to push the comparison too far. There are people whose presence has become so dependable that we arrange pieces of our lives around them. We know who will answer, who will show up, who will remember, and who will carry their part.

Whether we think about it very often or not, other people are building expectations around us too—not because of what we promise once, but because of what we repeatedly do.

Perhaps that is why absence can feel so large.

The pump continued moving wine as though nothing unusual had happened. Maybe, from its perspective, nothing had.

Twenty seconds of silence taught me to hear the faithfulness I had mistaken for ordinary.

Until next Sunday…

George

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