and so we wait

Photo by Andreas Dress on Unsplash

This week, I’ve been thinking about time and what we do in-between things. Those fleeting moments may seem insignificant but they hold a particular weight. The three minutes before your next meeting. The half-hour while your dinner is in the oven. The breaths before the oil on your pan gets hot enough to properly sear your protein. The heartbeats while you reheat your leftovers from last night.

I can guess the answers. For many, the true answer is “TikTok!”—the undisputed invader of “empty time”. For the parents of young kids and seasoned multitaskers—this notion of waiting is baffling, they simply do other things in those moments😅.

But sometimes we stumble into a season where we can’t see the clock’s hands. Is the minute hand at 11 and what does that mean here? We can’t see so we don’t know how long to wait. This feeling comes in different flavors. When you send a risky text and you’re waiting for a response. When you ace an interview and you’re anxiously waiting to hear back from the recruiter. Or when you’re waiting from a sign from above—be it God, the universe, nature—something out there to nudge you in a certain direction. You don’t know how long to wait.

How do you position your body to be open and expectant while you wait? Should you be an eager beaver, sitting at the front of your chair with half your bum off the chair…because your thing could arrive any moment now and you can’t wait to grab it? Or should you drop back and rest your lower back against the comfortable padding of the seat behind you? Knowing that the wait might in fact be a marathon and it’s better to prepare for the long run? Or should you forgo ergonomics altogether and wait in a deep squat…believing that if you teach your mind and muscles to wait in that position, you’d build deep resilience and thus, be able to surmount any challenge that comes your way?

These reflections reminded me of an essay I wrote in 2020. Waiting in a season when there’s no obvious end in sight. Three years later, I’m glad to say I’m a bit embarrassed by some of the writing—which is good, it means I’m improving! So today, I’m republishing a lightly-edited version of this piece.

And so we wait

And so we wait. Not in anticipation of any one thing. Or a particular cocktail of feelings that I could distill into a single serving, blending together hope, normalcy, and a dash of trepidation.

Yet we wait. Of course, we miss the time that preceded. We delude ourselves that we enjoy this phase of the wait. Sometimes, it feels true, we work from home and we can save more of our coins. But mostly it’s a lie we need to believe to get to the next day. We miss touch and depth—the warm embrace of our loved ones, and even the bombastic side-eyes from our opps. But the wait is here and wait we must.

I guess we wait. We feel hopeless as we can’t see the finish line. Anxious minds, cluttered thoughts, and heavy hearts visit our bodies from time to time. We thank them for their presence and understand that while they mean well, we wish for them to leave. So we can wait.

The weight of the wait is real. Handshakes, hugs, and hi-fives are distant memories we hopelessly try to recreate on Zoom. We dilly-dally on virtual happy hours that last too long. We don’t know the etiquette of this new world—is it rude to Irish exit a virtual party after ten minutes? We hop around from call to call in search of something worth staying online for.

Oh yes, we wait. We know that the mundane will become extraordinary after the wait. The dull and boring will sparkle before us. When we can sit in a cafe again without feeling the absurd need to aggressively monitor for coughs and sneezes. When you run into your work-spouse at the coffee machine. And when talk of curves and flattening of them has more to do with diets than epidemiology.

Till then, we wait on Dr Fauci to save us all.

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