On Waiting

I wonder, how much of my life do I spend waiting? Waiting in the doctor’s office, or to speak with someone already in conversation, or in the interminable line of vehicles during Bay Area rush hours that I’ve become more and more forgetful of with each semester away from home. If I measured it in hours and assigned myself a “waiting wage,” how much would I have spent on this one activity, waiting?

I think this is how I often think about waiting: as waste. Whenever I wait, especially if the awaited thing or person is important to me—with anxiety—I’m unable to do anything else but wait. I try reading books, but my mind wanders away from the words. I try exercising, but the worry returns between sets, and sometimes even as I grasp the bar in my fists, it intrudes. I have trouble focusing on, or amid waiting, I’m physically unable to do the things I want to do the most the way I want to do them.

Toward the end of my senior year of college, I was continuously waiting. That was what it felt like. I told friends I wanted to just press skip and get to graduation, not because I hated school or the people there, but because I felt so much uncertainty about the future that, rather than worriedly wait for it to pass, I wanted to dash straight into the unknown to make it known, to see what was on the other side. But I also loved being at school and so felt torn in two directions: One anchoring me to the present and the other pulling my mind months into the future.

Given the many hours we invariably spend waiting, it’s surprising that we are (or at least I am) so bad at it. Much has been said about how to construe the experience to be slightly less intolerable, and during my season of waiting, I read many. One article I encountered comes from Psychology Today and lists several practical remedies to the aching pain of waiting.

The first is to accept uncertainty.

I think uncertainty is the greatest contributor to the discomfort of waiting. What will the outcome of my application be? What will they say when I tell them the news? Even if we know exactly when something will happen, like the delivery of some package, still uncertain is how it will play out, from the potential experience buried in brown paper Amazon packaging to the decision about a job offer.

So, Psychology Today gives us three practical steps to help accept uncertainty: Focus on what you can control, keep a positive outlook, and let go. That sounds like pretty good advice. It’s what I’ve tried doing most of my life, turning my attention away from the uncontrollable uncertainty of waiting and toward something more productive in the present or some dream for the future. But I’ve also found this to be a poor long-term strategy. In fact, these are not even strategies for accepting uncertainty, but rather, to turn from it, to ignore it, and ultimately to deny it.

Applying this advice to other cases is pretty ridiculous. Let’s say you have a hard time getting along with someone (they just get on your nerves), but you want to accept them as they are. So, I tell you, rather than focus on the parts of that person you can’t control, which is pretty much everything, focus on the parts that you can control or instead focus on other people; or, keep a positive outlook, because maybe they’ll change some day and become less annoying; or, just let go of your annoyance toward the person, accept the fact that they’re difficult, and just accept them for who they are.

The first two pieces of advice are obviously avoidant and denying rather than accepting. The third borders the tautological: “Letting go” is the very outcome we are hoping for, so how can it also be one of the steps?

“We don’t grow when we refuse to be where God has placed us.”

Said a staff member of my campus ministry to a crowd of high-strung students one Saturday evening. He said it at a very fitting time as well, at least for me. I think it was the second semester of my sophomore year. It was also the early stages of the first “relationship” I had ever been in. I say “relationship,” however, because it only lasted around 2 weeks, followed by a long period of waiting. I could tell things weren’t going in the right direction, and that feeling became all the more real when she said she wanted to take a break from talking to think about things. Sure, that’s fine, or something like that was what I replied. Maybe it’d be a week, was what I thought, until it became two, then three, then a month. As much as I wanted to extinguish that last bit of hope, and even with all the time that passed, a part of me still clung to the possibility that things would magically work out.

I remember in that season of waiting how difficult it was to feel motivated about anything else. Much like how I felt the final semester of my senior year, it was as though I was boxed into this narrow, liminal space cut out of reality, suspended like a frozen shadow.

It was a loud wake-up call to start living the life I had in front of me. All that time, I was telling myself, I shouldn’t be here. I should be there, on the other side of the waiting, and the only purpose of the in-between, this waiting, was to get me from point A to point B. In my obsession to get past the waiting, I missed God’s purpose for me in the waiting: To diligently attend to my studies (I missed way too many COS 324 lectures that semester), to fulfill my responsibilities as my dance company’s publicity chair, and to be present in the lives of my friends rather than splitting myself between them and continuous navel-gazing.

Rather than tell myself I shouldn’t be here in the waiting, I began to accept the waiting and its uncertainty when I realized that God had, in His omniscient and thoughtful sovereignty, deliberately placed me in the waiting. Though I did not understand why I was there, I knew that because He said it was so, my waiting was doing something. It wasn’t mere waste, or just a time machine to an anticipated future. Truly, in that spell of uncertainty, in the waiting, He was doing something in my life.

Apart from a robust understanding of God’s sovereignty, I find it very hard to justify waiting or patience. To respond more directly to Psychology Today: On control, we have such little control over others, and the world around us, and even ourselves; on positivity, apart from some value system that assigns meaning to waiting and suffering, we cannot address any such instance as “good”; and on letting go, how can we let go of the future when, apart from the sovereign God, we have no one else to entrust our futures to but ourselves?

I still suck at waiting. In fact, I write this piece to cope with the season of waiting I’m experiencing now in the awkward transition between the end of undergraduate life and the beginning of my young adult life, as large uncertainties hide all but their contours behind the curtain separating today from tomorrow. In times like these, I remind myself it is not my business to know what lies behind it. My lot is the present, and whatever it is, would I say that it is well with me. As for the future, I hold onto the promise that He has made everything beautiful in its time. It’ll come when it’s time. And it’ll be right on time.