One of the most excruciating experiences in life is waiting. Waiting for news, waiting for an opportunity, waiting for things to improve. Waiting can quickly turn into suffering, but that pain comes at our own hands.
Life is full of waiting, for good or bad news, for long or short periods, in day-to-day minutia or in the broadest possible sense— from the moment that we are born, it can be said that we are waiting for the inevitability of death. In the interweaving years, we live our lives. On our worst day, we are paralyzed by the conceptualization that time is running out, but for the most part, we are able to put the fears aside or use them to our advantage.
The same can be the case with waiting in the minutia of the day-to-day. In a job interview, for example, often the process is apply, wait, recruiter call, wait, interview, wait, repeat until an offer or rejection occurs. This can take multiple weeks, with most of the time spent waiting. How do you avoid suffering? Two ways: turning the waiting process from passive to active, and remembering that your personhood is not comprised of any one aspect of your life
Every day, we occupy ourselves with the activities of living. Being alive requires a lot of work, and even the basics take up a lot of our time. In waiting for mundane things, we can take cues from the necessary functions of life. We can occupy our time and transform the waiting process from something that happens to us (passive) into one that can be our advantage (active).
Thinking about the outcome of some external event, like a job interview, only causes us pain as we double down in our imagination. As Seneca taught:
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
No amount of “thinking it through” after the fact can change a single thing. Rumination is always a temptation, an attempt to make sense of a future that hasn’t happened yet.
We can rewire our brains to anchor in the present, though, through deliberate mindfulness practice or by taking on healthy distractions. Actively using the waiting period to prepare for the possible outcomes, completing tasks on our to-do lists, clearing space for when the moment finally does arrive, or continuing progress in other areas of life.
This is integral to remembering that no one component is your entire life. Any potentially good or bad event can quickly become all-consuming to your psyche, but it’s important to remember that, even though it feels like the whole world, no single thing is. One of my education professors used to say “the only thing that is the end of the world, is the end of the world.” Remembering this is grounding and provides a path forward. What other areas of your life can you bring attention to while you wait? This question can turn the tide in the suffering, turning passive to active.
The brass tacks of waiting is this single truth: it sucks. You can train your brain, practice mindfulness, turn passive into active, remember that no thing is everything, and still suffer at the hands of a wait. Things like job interviews and waiting in traffic are trivial compared to the suffering of sickness or recovery, of healing trauma, of the pain of heartbreak. You may be able to use these tools in less vital situations, but with the harder stuff? Maybe not. But that is okay— use the tools when you can, and remember that you are human.
And it is a human thing to feel the pain of a wait.
Edited by Jeremy Harr and Abigail McKay Cherry
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