My building has terrible elevators. It's one of the five hundred things that keeps the price down, and I've made peace with it, except peace isn't really the word, because peace implies I had to get somewhere first. What I actually have is a game. A private, free, endlessly repeatable game of three card monte, except the trick isn't finding the card, the trick is not caring which card it is.
Here's how it works. I walk up to the elevator. I press the button. I have no desire to go up. I have no desire to go down. I have no requirement to be anywhere, because I have a phone and the entire internet and all telecoms in my pocket, and there is no location on earth where I am not already exactly where I need to be. So I stand there. And the elevator comes. Immediately. Every time. If I'm alone it goes straight to eight, straight to one, no stops, like the building itself is relieved someone finally asked for nothing.
Then someone else shows up.
And they want it. Now. They're late, or their feet hurt, or they've decided with total conviction that the up button will somehow summon the elevator faster if they also hit down, just in case, just to cover their bases, just to have optionality against a machine that does not negotiate. And the elevator, sensing this, takes forever. Stops at every floor. Picks up ghosts. Takes so long that the person eventually gives up and heads for the stairs, defeated by eight flights they chose over four more minutes of wanting something in front of a box that wasn't listening.
I used to think I'd found a benevolent trickster. Not Descartes' evil genius, cooking up a universe to deceive me, but the opposite—some kindly force rewarding desirelessness with speed. Let go and the elevator comes. Let go, let God, and the doors open.
But that's not quite it, and I only recently caught the actual mechanism, which is better than the trickster story because it doesn't require a trickster at all.
I don't time it. I never have. No stopwatch, no glance at my watch, no mental tally of how long I've been standing there. Time is irrelevant to me everywhere in my life, and the elevator doesn't get to be the one exception. Which means there is no "slow" for me to have caught the elevator being. Slow requires a clock. Late requires an expectation of on-time. I have neither, so the elevator can't fail me, structurally, the same way you can't lose a game you never agreed to keep score on. It's not that desirelessness beats the clock. It's that there's no clock, so there was never anything to beat.
Call it Schrödinger's elevator. Until somebody wants it badly enough to force the question, the car isn't fast or slow, isn't on floor two or floor seven, it's just unresolved, humming along in every possible position at once behind a set of doors that haven't opened yet. The box doesn't have a speed until somebody's desire collapses it into one. Alone, I never do the collapsing, so the elevator lives permanently in superposition, which from the outside looks exactly like it always arriving instantly, because there was never a slower version of events for it to have been instead.
None of this is resignation in the feeble sense, the kind where you've simply run out of fight and calling it peace after the fact. It's intentional resignation, which is a completely different animal. I have full capacity to want the elevator right now, to be irritated, to hit the button four more times like that's ever done anything. I'm choosing not to, on purpose, every single time, which takes exactly as much doing as choosing to want something does. It's not the loss of agency. It's agency, spent deliberately on not-wanting instead of wanting, which is a stranger and harder thing to pull off than it sounds.
Alone, this whole practice is a null experiment. Nothing to prove, nothing to measure, no opponent. It only becomes visible—dramatic, even—when I'm no longer alone in the hallway. When someone else's wanting shows up next to my not-wanting, and suddenly there's a contrast to see. Which means the whole show was never really about me and the elevator. It was about what happens when my empty room meets somebody else's crowded one.
And that's the real lesson the elevator's been giving me for free every day: willfulness doesn't work, because you are never the only will in the hallway. Everyone standing there has their own agenda, their own tolerance, their own private weather system of frustration—late for work, sick of this building, why do I even pay for elevators, might as well take the stairs, an entire novel running in somebody's head while I've got nothing up there but fluff. You can be as willful as you want. You will still be negotiating, whether you admit it or not, with every other will in the box. The only thing that has ever actually moved anything, in an elevator or anywhere else, is collaborative will, not willful will. Getting eight people to a shared floor requires something closer to consent than command.
I live in this building. I pay rent. I have zero elevator entitlement, and I mean that literally, not as a spiritual posture. A guy in my building once got furious waiting, the kind of furious where he starts narrating his case out loud to nobody, and he said there should be six elevators in a building this size, this is unacceptable, and I told him I'd lived in a lot of places in Europe where everything is a walk-up, or there's one single elevator retrofitted into a hundred-year-old stairwell that only sometimes works, and that two-thirds if not three-quarters of Europe has no elevator at all. Nine out of ten of my friends in Germany lived in walk-ups with coal-fired ovens, and to heat the place you went down to the basement, shoveled coal into a tote, and hauled it back up every flight yourself. And the top floor, the one everyone here would call the penthouse, was the cheapest apartment in the building, because it was the most stairs. Nobody there is standing in a lobby demanding six elevators. The entitlement is the thing making people furious, not the wait.
So part of what I actually tell myself, standing there, is a small private scale of gratitude that has nothing to do with what I'm owed. Three elevators running is Thanksgiving. That's cornucopia. Two running is a perfectly good weekend day, nothing to complain about. One running and I'm grateful there are any elevators at all in an eight story building. If all three are down, I'm grateful I have legs and a stairwell and can still get to my own apartment, on the eighth floor, out of eight floors, under my own power. And if you want to go all the way to the actual bottom of the ladder, the real worst case, it's not a slow elevator. It's the building on fire with everybody in it. Measured against that, a slow elevator isn't a failure of any kind. It's a wild, undeserved success. There is no rung on that ladder where I end up resentful, or disappointed, or frustrated. I built the scale so that every possible outcome lands somewhere between good and better, on purpose, so there's nowhere left for disappointment to live.
That's the real trick behind the serenity prayer, and why it's stronger than people give it credit for. It doesn't grant you control over the elevator. It doesn't magically speed anything up. What it does is stop you from hitching your wagon to a tractor you don't have the keys for. An engineless tractor is honest about it. It's dead, it's not going anywhere, nobody's confused. But a tractor with keys you don't hold is worse, because it could move, it's just never going to move for you, and you'll stand there straining against an ignition that was never yours to turn, mistaking the possibility of motion for an invitation. The elevator was never yours to control. The prayer doesn't fix that. It just stops you from lying to yourself about whose keys those are, and once the lying stops, you're just a person standing in a hallway, waiting for a box, with nowhere else you'd rather be and no clock telling you otherwise.
Schrödinger never cared whether the cat was in a hurry. That was always the joke. The box doesn't know what you want. It just knows whether you're still asking.