Delay, gratification

7-8 days shipping time. An hour's drive away. Three weeks before the schedules line up. Two hours 'till dark.

These are the delays: lengths of empty time separating me from a self-indulgent Lush purchase, from the nearest drive-in movie theater, from a weekend trip or a starry night.

And then, the gratification: Better than the shelves of right-here-right-now at CVS, better than the movies downloading on a tiny laptop screen, better than a half-enjoyed single nights' trip, better than - well, there's no hurrying sunset. Better than no sight of the stars at all.

It's a virtue, the perserving through the wait; it's a sign of good socialization if you have the self-control to hold off for the bigger payoff. And fundamentally, it's a trade-off. Something better than the best thing you could grab right now, but in exchange, the waiting, the doing-without, the inconvenience, the enduring, the unpleasantness.

It's not just a virtue; it's a sacrifice. Temporary abstention. It's something to teach children like sitting still when your muscles scream to move, eating things that taste bitter, working when you want to stop. You pay for your pleasure with a length of dissatisfaction, you earn your joy with your grim stolidity.

That, at least, is the way I've always understood delayed gratification: an unpleasant wait and eventually a satisfaction just profound enough to make up for all your inconvenience.

But here - where everything feels so far away, where buying or seeing or eating anything takes so long, where there's no such thing as ordering delivery or running to the grocery store - I'm starting to think I had it all backwards.

The delay is the reward. The wait is the gratification. The payoff? Eh. It's not so great. All the fanciest soaps in the world would provide not a whit of existential satisfaction. The movies always disappoint in the end. Vacations are exhausting, the starry nights are cold. There's pleasure in them, but it wouldn't be worth any grim endurance.

But it's more than worth the wait it takes, because the wait is wonderful. I live in an odd world here, its true, as beautiful as it is sparse. Waiting here is as luxurious as it is necessary. In some places, an hour's drive might really be a sacrifice, and an optional one, and my understanding of the value of delay would be unchanged. But here, an hour through Amish countryside, sun shining over uninterrupted hills of green, gray and red barns, peaceful cows, a playlist on shuffle and a van loaded with carless friends - that's the only way to get to a theater, and it's a pleasure, one that would be notably absent from a five-minute drive to a theater in town. And shopping in stores on your way home - a single purchase, immediately in hand? Oh, why bother? There's no frisson of anticipation, no checking of tracking numbers and imagining unsmelled-scents. I'll pay extra for a longer shipping time, thanks; send it to me via Scotland and Nepal, give my box customs stickers from foreign locales, let my package have adventures and tell me how it goes, I'll wait.

A spontaneous vacation would probably be delightful; but right now, when that's impossible, I have endless possibilities and no need to winnow them down. Miles on miles of urban bike trails in Montreal, dozens of bed and breakfasts along the way, right now I can stay at them all; or an Amtrak to the City, a night blowing our unspent change on a show? Why not? Which show? They're all on my list, no possibility excluded.

And then the slightly shifting colors of the sun's slow decline.

I'm rethinking what it means to be patient. Psychologists talk of delayed gratification in the mathematical terms of an economist, the future benefits delayed, but I'm starting to think of hiking: longer paths to taller peaks, the scampering of tiny chipmunks and the call of invisible birds along the way, the sweet thigh-burning of the climb.

And its starting to seem more and more misguided to lock a child in a room with a single marshmallow and tell them they get two if they wait. This may be an effective test to see if they can endure delayed gratification, but it teaches them nothing of how to enjoy it.

Sit them instead in front of an oven, with a box of Chips Ahoy in the trash and a big bowl of cookie dough in their laps and teach them to roll the sweetness into a ball; Marvell had it wrong, there's time enough for this. Lined up on a pan, popped in the oven. Longer than it takes to pop a cookie from a plastic tray, but not unpleasant for the extra time; no squirming, hand-biting, self-denying sacrifice. Just the smell of baking cookies.

I'm learning to inhale.