On Waiting

We spend so much of life in the anteroom. Waiting for the results, the call, the decision, waiting for things to start or things to end. Waiting, simply, for clarity.

I've been trying to get better at inhabiting the in-between.

For a long time I treated waiting as a problem to be solved, a gap to be filled, a deficiency of the present. I made lists. I distracted myself. I tried to will the waiting into resolution through the sheer intensity of my attention to it.

This doesn't work, as I suspect everybody already knows.

The present moment isn't an obstacle to the future. It's the only thing that is actually happening.

What seems to work, at least sometimes, is treating the waiting as a kind of weather. Not good or bad, just present. You do not spend a rainy day wishing it wasn't raining. Or rather, you can, but it doesn't change anything and it makes the day only worse.

I had a conversation recently with someone who described being in a period of radical uncertainty and said: "I have been trying to stay interested in what I do not know yet." I thought that was a remarkable reframe, interested rather than anxious, curious rather than afraid.

There is something about uncertainty that's genuinely interesting, if you can find the angle. The story is not written, the ending is not fixed. You are, in this particular anteroom, genuinely free.

I'm not saying I manage this consistently, but I am practicing.

Written in Germany