We are losing our ability to wait. As our modern world becomes ever more responsive to our every need, and is able to fulfill our every wish almost immediately 24/7, we have come to expect instant gratification and get stressed when we don't receive it straightaway. We want it all and we want it now and you know what...we can have it (subject to status, terms and conditions apply)!
In today's marketplace, companies compete on time. We live in an era when product quality is pretty standard and most things have become commodities, where globalisation has shifted the costs of producing things to the cheapest possible places, where a lot of things we buy are not 'things' in the traditional sense at all (where we buy time in the real world so we can spend more of it leading virtual lives in virtual worlds), and where our rate of consumption continues to accelerate. We can have it good, we can have it cheap, now if only we can have it faster...
And so the treadmill speeds up all the time: we cycle through more stuff at ever increasing speed. And as we do so, the things with which we have an ever more fleeting acquaintance (buy, use, dispose) lose their solidity, their magic, their 'thingness' as they light up our lives for a nanosecond before scattering in a shower of evanescent sparks. As the essence drains out of the things that once gave meaning to our lives, the things that had duration and staid with us sometimes for generations, the things you really got to know, our relationship with our physical universe is changing too.
In the old wisdom veiled by the mists of time (well, twenty to thirty years ago at least) we were led to believe that things were worth waiting for. The very act of waiting, whether it was for a new toy, losing your virginity or deciding on a major life change, imbued that experience with a kind of otherworldly magic, gave it some real intrinsic value. The mere fact that there was a gap in time between a wish and its fulfilment gave you the space to reflect on what it was you wanted; the length of the wait was often seen as an indicator of the importance of what you wanted: did you really want this thing, how badly did you want it, was it a real need or just a want?.
Of course, this process of anticipation, of deferred gratification, often led to frustration and ultimate disappointment ("is that all it is? - not quite what it is cracked up to be!".) but it also gave an aura, a mystique to the universe of things and experiences. The very act of waiting for something gave intrinsic value to the thing we were waiting for.
Sometimes, life forces us to pause, to spend time waiting for our lives to start moving forward again - we need to respect this. The major turning points in our lives will often require us to stand still for a while and reflect on where we are going next: preparing for parenthood, grieving over the death of a loved one, periods of convalescence, depression, loss of faith, loss of confidence. These are the moments of pure waiting. We can't even begin to think about what we are waiting for; the future is still unformed, pregnant with possibility but deferred, still gestating, awaiting (re) birth.
Doris Lessing wrote very powerfully about these experiences of pure waiting, of the waiting for something to happen, in her Martha Quest series of books. Martha gives herself up to the waiting, embraces it and uses that breathing space to discover what really matters in her life. And in this vacuum, invisible unfelt energies are battling, coalescing and scattering to gradually bring forth a new life and a new direction. In this seemingly empty space between wishing and doing, Martha lives in the realm of being, waiting for her true life to reveal itself.
As we continue to squeeze the waiting out of our lives, as we continue to spin faster and faster in our daily rounds of busyness, we risk losing these opportunities for insight and growth simply by refusing to wait.
