The Absurdity of Waiting
The Absurdity of Waiting. The Practice of Presence. Navigating the Past, Present, and Future.
“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
―Lao Tzu
A lot of one’s life is spent waiting. Waiting in line. On hold. In the doctors office. Waiting for school to end for your degree to be completed, your career started, your book finished. Waiting to find that perfect partner or spouse. Waiting for your kids to get out of diapers and into school or out of school. Waiting for citizenship or papers. A driver’s license or the day we turn twenty-one. That house project to be done. The garden to grow. Waiting for this dumbfucshi$%^& pandemic to be over!
We spend most of our lives in this limbo—in between one thing and the next. There is an anxiousness to waiting as it is generally considered a purgatorial sphere. You are in the present, not the past, yet waiting for something in the future to come, not wanting to be in the present moment. Rarely do we want to be in the present when our lives are in the midst of waiting.
Just the other night, my sister went to the hospital after suffering from a chronic respiratory ailment that closes up her throat. It was a serious emergency and yet she still spent four hours in a waiting room, just to see a doctor. Then she spent another several hours waiting for surgery. This was not the fun type of waiting. It was awful waiting.
And yet there is also a way in which waiting is a function of another aspect of life—passing time. There is a lot of time to pass in life. Once you get older, they say life goes fast. But not in the present. The present has always felt too slow to me. I am always, already, wanting to be onto the next one, the next thing. And yet, there are days too we spend waiting, but not necessarily in an anxious way. For instance, now that I am a stay-at-home dad, I have somewhere between nine and ten hours every day to fill with a toddler and an infant. That is a lot of time! I am met with this vast surplus of time at the start of the day and I also (some days) spend a lot of time where I am waiting for the day to end, yet still find myself having to find activities to fill the day with until it does in the meantime. This could be an anxious waiting. Or it could be a more pleasant and present “passing time” sort of day where I am engaged in the current moment.
I don’t think passing time is such a bad thing. If we are passing time we can still be in the present moment, not necessarily living to our hearts content, but making do with what is in front of us while we wait for what is to come. Maybe all of life is this journey of waiting, entering into this practice of presence and mindfulness most of us are trying to rush around or escape in some way.
If I was just to wake up and wait anxiously all day until my wife came home and we could put the kids to bed and finally watch HBO, I would be missing out on a lot. Both as a father and as someone who is supposed to father them. My anxious waiting would take me out of the current present. And while I desperately wish for my kids to grow older and be able to take care of themselves, there is also the reality that I will miss this precious littles time with them in the future and look back on it with a sense of nostalgia. But why? Because if in the present moment of that past moment I was only looking towards the future, it would be a complete waste of living. I would have squandered my past “present” by always looking forward to the future.
Giannis Atentekounmpo of the Milwaukie Bucks sums this up in a different way (at a press conference last year when a reporter asked him how he doesn’t have ego when he’s only 26). The reporter says that most of the players have only figured out the ego thing when they got into their thirties. Giannis has a great response (in full here) “When you focus on the past, that’s your ego,” Giannis says “…and when I focus on my future that’s my pride … but I try to focus on in the moment, in the present, because that’s humility.”
This is all to say, the present is all we have. I think the true meaning of life circles around this idea of presence in some way. Where we can slow down and choose to love others and remain present rather than worrying about what is to come or what is behind us.
Right now there is nothing I want more than to be climbing some mountain or traveling or writing or going on a book tour or snowboarding or just simply not picking up feces from my children on a daily basis … but then I would be missing out on so much good shit! Ha.
We all want our lives to be extraordinary, but sometimes the most extraordinary moments are those in the ordinary.