In praise of waiting

Written for Linkedin: view the original here.

 

I had my first post-pandemic hospital appointment in London this week. I approached it with a sense of curiosity, having not seen either the inside of a hospital or indeed what has become of London on a busy weekday since Covid-19 reached our shores.

My enduring thought, once I had got home, was that the entire episode had been characterised by a total absence of waiting.

There was no waiting on the underground for several trains to pass before having a hope in hell’s chance of getting on; no waiting in the hospital as patients weren’t permitted to arrive any more than 15 minutes before their appointment; not even that much of a queue for a delightful spot of lunch afterwards.

 

Hospitals are a fascinating place to observe the phenomenon of waiting. Our bodies have an annoying tendency to do whatever they’re going to do: no other betrayal of our desire to be in control and command is quite so immediate, arresting and confronting as the refusal of the material shell housing our being to play ball.

It is an experience of waiting in which many people find themselves restlessly grappling with crushing passivity. It’s etched on the anxious faces; symbolised in the mindless fidgeting; spoken in the banal small talk.

Passivity, indeed, is how we tend to view the business of waiting. This year, that’s perhaps not unsurprising, when we seem to have done nothing but wait, with no certainty, to do anything from going to work to seeing our loved ones.

 

Yet waiting has always been disparaged and misunderstood as a futile exercise in passivity – the default into which we lapse when we do nothing else. To achieve, we are constantly reminding each other that we need to do things, and not to put off to tomorrow that which can be done today. We shouldn’t just have goals, but we should be constantly embarking on our course to do what needs to be done. There is always a self-important guru to tell us that it’s all in the mind and all we have to do is to be willing to set our hearts on the glittering stars above. There is rarely a change manager courageous enough to tell their clients and employers to put a pause on yet another relentless set of changes.

I wouldn’t mind betting that the most successful lockdown content on LinkedIn will turn out to be that which told us of things we should be doing to make the most of lockdown, no doubt from important-sounding people whose titles include words like ‘Inspirational.’ It probably won’t be recommendations to accept the pause as a chance to listen to the still, small, inner voice of the mind that confronts us with our deepest questions, so readily drowned out when empty moments of time are treated as our enemy.

 

Yet there is no escape from waiting. Even our best efforts often depend on the decisions of others to be rewarded. Waiting is, in fact, as non-negotiable a part of the human experience as eating, drinking and sleeping.

Waiting exists at many different levels. At its most extreme is existential waiting – the anticipation of an event that threatens the certainty of our existence, from religious notions of an apocalyptic judgement, to more recent fears about a nuclear war and latterly a climate catastrophe.

There is the kind of waiting in which timescales and the nature of what we’re anticipating are known, but there’s also that more intuitive waiting in which we know that the time isn’t right yet, and that things aren’t ordered as such to give us A or to make it wise for us to do B.

No matter who we are, waiting is stitched so intricately into the fabric of our reality that it cannot be explained without it.

 

The life of Siddharth Gautama, the Buddha, is instructive here. Growing up as the son of a king, the Buddha lived a life of luxury. A seer predicted that, if he remained in the palace, he too would become a king, but if he left, he would become a religious teacher. Naturally, therefore, his father was eager that he should remain in his palace. Eventually, in an act of rebellion, Gautama left his opulent surroundings and in so doing, his eyes were finally opened to the squalid reality of human suffering in the world outside.

With his destiny changed forever, did Buddha immediately compensate by going into overdrive with activities to remedy the injustices of his society? No, he committed himself to his own enlightenment, recognising the necessity that he should do this first. He sat, as the story goes, under the bodhi tree and meditated, it is said for 49 days. After much waiting for clarity on which of his choice of destinies would prevail, the key figure in a pathway to wisdom that has endured for thousands of years chose yet more silence, and yet more waiting.

Our own engagement with the world can equally teach us the Buddha’s lesson that there is wisdom in waiting. If any of you mentor anyone, is it a polished, finished and perfected version of you that your mentee is interested in? Or is it all the learning, setbacks, highs and lows that marked your time of waiting?

 

Waiting, then, isn’t that which we do when there’s nothing else. It is simply the existence of anticipation. Perhaps it tells us a story about the way things are and the way they need to be. Perhaps it calls for acceptance. Perhaps it is, indeed, an invitation to consider what excuses we’re making to ourselves and others. Whatever the case, it isn’t a whole lot of nothing!

Instead of shrugging it off, therefore, we need to ask what the waiting within our own lives demands of us. Instead of thinking that action spares us from waiting, we need to understand that it only shapes the waiting we still have to do.

But just as the Buddha found enlightenment by making a commitment to mindful waiting, so we can reach greater heights if we become more in praise of waiting.