The Waiting is the Reward
Billy Loves Jane
Living by Making | Issue 23
At the Workbench
The back of my daughter’s wedding table is done. Not because that’s where I wanted to finish, but because I ran out of time, and it happens to be the one side nobody but me will ever inspect closely enough to notice. Bums me out but I have to let it go.
The wood for the base came out of the gymnasium where my youngest daughter went to school, salvaged bleacher lumber from a building that opened in 1955. The district finally tore the old bleachers out in 2018, or close enough to it, my memory on the exact year is fuzzy, and replaced them with something newer and safer. I hauled the old boards home because good wood is good wood and I never turn down free lumber. Then they hung out in the woodshop for years, the way reclaimed wood always does, until a project shows up that needed them.
It took six years to tell me. Elise sat in that gym from 2016 to 2022, watched and played volleyball and basketball from those bleachers as a kid, before and after they got replaced, never knowing there was a story sitting under her the whole time. She got married this year. The table is for her. And the board I reached for to build the base bracket turned out to be the one with a heart carved into it: Billy loves Jane.
Under the Surface
I don’t know who Billy and Jane were. I don’t know if that carving is from 1955 or 1995, only that it happened sometime in a window of one to sixty-five years between 1955, when the original bleachers went in, and 2018, when they came out. Whoever Billy and Jane were, they left something behind and never came back to check if it survived. It survived. It sat quiet under gymnasium bleachers through however many thousand games, plainly visible the whole time to anyone who happened to look, waiting, hoping only for someone to recycle who wouldn’t plane or sand it away before noticing it was there.
That’s an extreme version of the same mechanism I ran into with the resin for this same table. My last pour fought me for four weeks, viscosity all wrong so it wouldn’t self-level, before I discovered the company had quietly renamed the product I’ve used for years, and I’d been troubleshooting a bottle that was never actually broken. Four weeks to find a four-minute fix. Small potatoes next to sixty-five years, but it’s the same mechanism: the reward comes from not knowing how long the gap will last, not from the fix itself.
Dopamine doesn’t peak when you get the thing you were working toward, waiting on, or expecting. It peaks in the gap before it, in the reaching, especially when you can’t be sure it’s coming or when. Robert Sapolsky has a lecture on this, and the short version is that a monkey pressing a lever gets its biggest dopamine spike not when the food shows up, but in the seconds after the signal and before the food arrives, in the not-knowing-yet. Billy waited the longest of anybody in this story, and he isn’t even here to feel the payoff.
Studio Notes
Before I could use that board I had to scrape off a layer of hardened gum, which sounds worse than it actually was, though it did leave me picturing some freckled, ornery seventh grader pressing his gum onto the underside of his seat sometime between Eisenhower and whatever president was in office when my youngest daughter was in fourth grade, grinning like he’d pulled off a genuine crime. Once I got past the gum, there it was. Billy loves Jane, faint enough now that only taking another sixteenth inch off with the planer would erase it for good. I decided against taking that sixteenth.
My overactive brain built a whole life for two people I will never meet. High school sweethearts most likely, married by now, maybe grandkids at that same school, maybe they came back for a game some Friday night and sat, without knowing it, on the exact board where Billy had carved their names decades before and never told a soul. Insert random rabbit hole, the kind I constantly find myself chasing. I loved finding the little nugget of history on the bleacher seat. I was tempted to go through the graduating records since 1955 to see if I could find who Billy and Jane might have been. In the end I decided to write a song about it this week. That was either an overreaction or the most honest one I’ve had all year. Actually, I co-wrote the song with Suno. I write the lyrics, Suno lays the track. A fun collaboration. Billy loved Jane, long before I knew their names. That line came out of me almost whole, first try, which almost never happens.
I planed the board to size, trying to leave some of the carving, marked and drilled the pilot holes, cut fluted dowels and glued them in loose on purpose, meant as guidance and support rather than as fasteners, then drilled for the inserts and ran bolts through the wood into them. All that’s left now is bolting the top to the base and finishing the top itself. Finishing touches Friday morning, on a table that will hold up as a wedding gift next to a stranger’s love letter that took sixty-five years to get read. Cool.
On the Table
You’ve probably got a version of Billy’s board somewhere in your own life, something made or written or said years ago and then buried, not lost exactly, just waiting for the right person to plane down to the right layer. If a project of yours has a real wait built into it right now, paint drying, dough proofing, a decision you’re wading through, try noticing the wait instead of racing past it the way I nearly planed straight through that board without seeing the carving at all. Set a timer for five minutes. Think about the thing. Picture how it will look or feel once it’s actually done. That kind of noticing on purpose often produces a bigger dopamine spike than the moment the wait actually ends, and most of us skip it entirely, racing straight past the reach toward the outcome.
In Good Company
Two things crossed my path this week that make my four-week resin saga chasing resin problems look almost embarrassingly short.
Watch: Charles Ross broke ground on Star Axis, a naked-eye observatory built into the New Mexico high desert, in 1976. He conceived it in 1971. It’s still not finished, and it’s slated to open to the public sometime after this year, fifty years into an architectural art piece that measures earth-to-star alignments in solid granite and steel. There’s a six-minute documentary at staraxis.org worth the six minutes, if only to take in what it means to pace a life’s work against the actual movement of the stars. I can’t wait to see it in person.
Read: Cortis & Sonderegger, two Swiss photographers, build elaborate physical models over weeks, a shattered space capsule, a Hindenburg replica mid-fire, entire icons of photographic history faked from scratch just to photograph the fake and make it feel true again on film. Their process notes at cortissonderegger.ch make a strong case for how much of the reward in photographic image-making was never really about the shutter click.
Listen: Robert Sapolsky’s 2011 Pritzker Lecture at the California Academy of Sciences has a five-minute stretch, widely clipped online as “Dopamine Jackpot,” where he lays out the anticipation research plainly enough that you don’t need a neuroscience background to follow it. Search the title. It’s short, and it rewires how you think about waiting for anything. Sapolsky covers this same idea in The Great Simplification (Episode 88, “The Brain, Determinism, and Cultural Implications,” recorded Aug 2023)
A Quiet Note
Unhurried Letters runs on this same mechanism of anticipation, and I didn’t plan it that way going in, it just turned out to be true after the fact. You don’t just get an object once a month. You enter a waiting window the moment you subscribe, and some of the actual reward lives there, in the not-yet, as well as the unboxing itself. The seal that must be broken, the writing and art that took someone real time to make, all of it is doing reward work, not just aesthetic work. unhurriedletters.com It is super fun for me to create and super cool to anticipate opening. AND I think just as satisfying to open and bask in the presence if only for 20 minutes.
Leave the Light On
I still don’t think slow living is about wanting less. It’s about wanting on a longer fuse and staying present for the burn instead of skipping ahead to see if the spark was worth it. Four weeks chasing a mislabeled bottle wasn’t the good kind of waiting, and I wouldn’t sign up for it twice. But somewhere between 1955 and 2020, a kid named Billy carved a few words into a gym bleacher and walked away without ever finding out if they’d survive. They did. My daughter sat on that exact board as a girl, never knowing, and this year she’s got married, and a piece of that bleacher from 1955 is holding up her table.
One More Thing. Here is the song about Billy and Jane. I Couldn’t help it. If you want to hear it, it’s below.
Tio
Billy loved Jane, long before I knew their names. Now, somehow, so do I.
References
Sapolsky, R. (2011). Pritzker Lecture, California Academy of Sciences, “Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of Pleasure.” openculture.com summary and video
Star Axis, Charles Ross, ongoing since 1971/1976. staraxis.org
Cortis & Sonderegger, Icons project. cortissonderegger.ch
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