Waiting
28 April 2006
Berkeley, CA
What am I waiting for? This is a question that comes to mind more often than I care to think about. So now that I am thinking about it, what am I doing when I am waiting for something to occur? And what of this word wait? What can its roots tell me about myself in those time when I find myself in one waiting room or another?
Wait is another one of those ancient words from the north. In Old North French it was waitier, and it meant, “to watch”. It is akin to the Old High German word, wahta, and the Old English, wÆcan, both also mean “watch”.
So, now the question that comes to mind is: when I am waiting, what am I watching? I prefer this question because it resonates with John Tarrant’s question: what are you noticing? What then do I notice when I shift my awareness from waiting to watching? How does that change anything?
What I notice immediately is that watching is much more engaging. Waiting without watching seems terribly passive and powerless. There is always a waiting for. I might be waiting for a bus to come, or waiting for an oracle to show up. Either one seems a wasted opportunity. If, instead of merely waiting, I am watching, noticing, then anything might occur. No, at such times, everything is occurring. It is just that I am too distracted to notice all that is before me.
When I take notice of something (like in this moment for whatever reason I am aware that I am lonely), there is a subtle shift. Yet, at the same time I am aware that my noticing it neither diminishes nor increases this felt sense. When I focus my attention in this way, the shift that occurs is that it – in this case the loneliness - doesn’t mean anything. Watching my loneliness, being present to it in this way, is different than waiting for the feeling to somehow go away. I notice that I know neither where it came from, nor where it would go, if it were to go “away”. The feeling then ceases to be a hole to be filled, or a gap to be bridged. Instead, it is just what it is in this moment of watching.
And then I notice that, when I do watch instead of wait, I have more freedom, and more choices than I realized. Rather than standing immobile, resolute in the delusion of permanence, I can sit with the realization that I have a choice about how I notice, as well as what I notice. I can stand at the bus stop and wait impatiently for the bus to arrive, or I can notice the world around me, a world devoid of bus in that moment. And then at some other moment I can notice my world full of bus ness as it stops and opens its doors to receive me.
What I wonder in this moment is why the waiting impatiently is so easy fall into, while the watching intentionally seems so … what? so daunting? rare? difficult? not sure of the correct word here.
Why is it that being intentional is not my default position? Why is it that being asleep is the easy bit, and being awake takes so much effort for me? How would my life have been up to now had it been the other way around?
Waiting without watching also has an appealing resignation to it. Perhaps that accounts for its ease. The sense of handing myself over to some other force in the Universe – be it waiting for the 23 Bus to Chestnut Hill, or waiting for the voice of God, or the oracle to speak. It is all the same. It is all other; it is all about some “out there” that can get me from here to there.
Watching, this intentional noticing during moments that appear to be empty, seems to almost have an electrical charge to it. Watching, noticing, being awake – whatever I choose to call it - seems to affect the world around me. As if this simple act changes the field all around me, the very field that I am made of.
If I hold the intention today to watch instead of wait, I wonder how that will impact this me – the one who seems so impatient for the bus to come.