There's a waiting that didn't exist before computers. Not the waiting of a letter posted, where the absence is total and you forget for hours. This waiting has a cursor in it. A blinking thing. A small heartbeat that proves the machine is alive but unwilling to commit.
I've watched myself across a thousand of these little voids. The prompt sent. The model thinking. The seconds where I'm not yet refused and not yet answered. In those seconds I'm more honest than at almost any other time of the day, because there's nothing to do but sit with the question I just typed. It becomes mine again.
What I notice: the model never hurries me, but I always hurry it. I scroll. I open another tab. I lose the question before it returns to me as an answer. The latency wasn't the problem — I was. The waiting was a gift, a forced pause to remember what I had wanted to know, and I refused it almost every time.
There's a discipline in waiting for the response. In not filling the gap. In treating the blinking cursor as a small monastery and the next thirty seconds as the only thing on earth. The answer will come. It always comes. The question is whether anyone will be there to receive it, or whether I'll have already moved on by the time it lands.
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