The Waiting Game
Patience is wating. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow, that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Leo Tolstoy
As some of you may know I recently moved house. It’s one of the most stressful life tasks to undertake, I can unfortunately vouch for that! I did wonder what is it that makes it so stressful? There are the obvious factors, managing lots of different people, dealing with a large amount of money, not to mention the personal attachments we may have with the concept of home.
But the one reason which I had not directly considered was how much waiting is involved in the whole process. At every stage, I found myself waiting for someone to do something. From making my first offer for my new home, to getting responses to my lawyer’s queries, for agents to call me back, to waiting for completion so I can move in. I personally found the waiting very difficult to be with, even though it was entirely inevitable. The anxiety of waiting made me feel quite queasy and was really horrible to be with.
What is it about waiting that is so tough?
As humans, we crave certainty. This need is primal and connected to our survival. If we have certainty, we know what to expect and therefore we can make preparations. When we are left waiting, we are essentially having to sit in uncertainty. We don’t know what is happening. Waiting puts us on hold, into inaction or delay. Our sense of safety is eroded as well as having to sit in the draining emotion of anticipated anxiety.
Waiting also forces us to notice the passing of time, a reflection of our mortality. I always think of a line from the film Fight Club when the main character is too early checking in for his flight, “this is your life and its ending one moment at a time.” In fact, research has shown that time spent waiting can feel longer than actual time as it is unoccupied and therefore deemed unproductive.
If we think back to the heavy days of the Covid lockdowns, we were all in a state of perpetual waiting. Waiting for the next Government announcement, queueing to enter our local supermarket, waiting for news of a vaccine, waiting for normality to return. The immense uncertainty had an impact on us all.
Once the waiting is over, we get to determine our next steps. Unlike the characters Vladmir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, we get to experience that sense of relief that our lives can move on. Even if the end of waiting brings a negative outcome, it still shifts us out of uncertainty and into knowing. We now have a sense of direction and moving forwards. A sense of some control returns.
How can we get better at waiting?
Waiting in life is inevitable, if we want to move forward then we need to get better at tolerating this uncomfortable space. How can we make waiting more bearable?
US psychologist, Dr Michelle Davis advises that developing awareness of ourselves during our waiting time can help ease our stresses. Taking deep breaths, redirecting our focus, and grounding ourselves with meditation are recommended. The quality of patience is what we sometimes call an earth quality, so grounding ourselves while waiting can really help. Other ideas to help our tolerance include getting lost in a flow activity which occupies our attention and focus.
US professor, Jason Farman (and author of “Delayed response; The art of waiting from the Ancient to the instant world”) proposes to go against our society’s desire to eradicate all waiting times and instead we should “build in pauses” into our lives to allow for boredom and daydreaming “to get people to imagine new futures.” Farman’s idea echoes that of neurological research which has shown that when we’re bored waiting, a part of our brain called “the default network” gets activated which is often referred to as the imaginational network.
I really appreciate Farman’s ideas on waiting, it does feel that as a society we are determined to remove any sense of waiting in life (buy now, pay later, internet deliveries sent within hours etc.), but to what cost not only to our patience but also to our imagination and creativity? As philosopher Jean Jacques Rosseau describes, “patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash
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