Queueing at the post office yesterday to send a package. Social distancing, masking. I joined the chorus of obliging customers, willing to take our turns. I felt patient and cooperative in my waiting.
Video conferencing a week ago with my sibs to discuss our ailing mother. Four there, one late. We small talked and we waited. And then we waited some more. I felt prickly and irritated in my waiting.
Digesting the recent dismal numbers showing spikes in COVID-19 infections after all 50 states eased quarantine restrictions. I feel resigned and philosophical in my waiting. How can I get better at it?
We can’t go out the way we used to. We can’t be together the way we used to. As much as we want it to be the way we want it to be, reliable data points in another direction. And so we as a nation and me as a person must take this bitter medicine, the prescription that is anathema to our drive-thru, swipe-right, click-here culture. We. Must. Wait.
Waiting is a curious, shape shifting enterprise and something that besets us all. We wait in public. We wait in private. We wait alone, and sometimes we wait together. At times we take it on willingly; at other times it is imposed. Vladimir and Estragon waited for Godot. Penelope waited for Odysseus. I am waiting for my UPS delivery guy. We are all waiting for a time when we can dance together, embrace one another and throng in a pageant of humanity, skin to skin. Some of us are perhaps more graceful with waiting. I struggle with it.
As a child, I learned that waiting had something to do with not now. Waiting for my birthday, for Santa Claus, for school to end, for dessert to be served. In my childhood religious training, waiting was associated with patience. And patience, I was told, is a virtue. Waiting was inherent in sublimating my timetable for the unforeseen schedule of the Almighty. It felt imposed and unchosen but I was a child believing all that adults told me.
As I grew, I moved into other ways of understanding waiting. For the reader in me, waiting is in the taxonomy of suspense. Anticipation builds as my imagination flexes its muscles and sorts through the foreshadowing to see if I am clever enough to predict an outcome or a twist. Waiting has noble elements of discipline, sacrifice and steadfastness. But the most pungent lessons our dominant culture teaches me about waiting are that it is passive and powerless. And worst of all: it is unproductive—a potent, un-American adjective.
The contemporary philosopher Dr. Seuss speaks to the thrill of moving outward into the larger world in his book Oh, The Places You’ll Go! The book is a graduation speech staple. In one passage, Seuss relays the pitfalls of The Waiting Place, a way station peopled by lethargic losers: “Waiting for a train to go/ or a bus to come, or a plane to go/ or the mail to come, or the rain to go/ or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow/ or the waiting around for a Yes or No/ or waiting for their hair to grow./ Everyone is just waiting.”
Waiting, he admonishes, is not for you. Go getters do not wait. They go and they get. And they get it fast. As actress Carrie Fisher archly observed in the early 1980s, “Instant gratification takes too long.”
I chafe against it because waiting asks me to sit with my helplessness and to acknowledge the puny range of my powers. It appears that although I can hold my breath underwater and ride my bike with my hands in the air, I am unable to shape the world to my liking. I cannot make pandemics evaporate. And so I must wait.
We are told that good things come to those who wait, right? Well, maybe. But so might depression, anxiety and a draining of energy–the way air seeps from an inflatable raft. As I’m wrestling with seeing waiting as the new “go getting,” I am revisiting Ram Dass and his be-here-now thinking.
My starting place is a sentence about waiting written by the Tibetan Buddhist and philosopher Pema Chodron. Chodron says this in her book When Things Fall Apart: “By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.“
I like the tension in that idea, the friction. I am all over the restlessness half of the sentence. My work is to explore the spaciousness. Maybe I can see and feel waiting as a big room, a meadow, the steppes, an ocean. Instead of feeling a wait as an acid drip, I will try to float into it, as weightless as an astronaut in outer space.
Maybe it is all easier than I make it out to be. I put myself through college as a waitress, a job formed around the word wait. I tracked the etymology of waitress and found its wellspring from the French verb attendre, to wait. Attendre transmuted into attendant, and from there the word waiter evolved. To attend is to be present. To wait is to stay where one is. I believe this just may be my prescription, something so simple it has most likely made it way inside fortune cookies. Stay where you are and be present.
I shall give that a try.
