On Waiting

Men tend to arrive believing that waiting is the part in between. The dull stretch separating one thing from the next, to be got through with as little of it as possible. They say so, usually in the form of a complaint dressed as a question about timing.

It takes a while for most of them to notice that the waiting is where nearly everything happens. Not because I have arranged it that way as a lesson, though I would not pretend I mind, but because attention behaves like that. A thing you are given immediately occupies the moment it takes to receive. A thing you are made to wait for occupies every hour before it.

You can watch a man work this out. He begins by asking how long. Then he stops asking, not because he has become obedient about it but because he has realised the answer would spoil something he has started to enjoy. That shift is one of the more honest moments available in this, and it is entirely his own. I did nothing except decline to shorten the interval.

There is a version of waiting that is only cruelty, and it is worth naming so we are not confused about which one this is. Waiting with no end and no acknowledgement is abandonment with better manners. A man left genuinely uncertain whether he has been forgotten is not being held in anything. He is simply alone and constructing an explanation.

What I mean is the other kind. He knows he has been heard. He knows the thing is coming. He does not know when, and that single missing piece is enough to keep him present in a way that certainty never manages. He checks nothing and thinks about it constantly. He is, for once, entirely here.

The men who cannot do it are not weak, whatever they tell themselves afterwards. They are usually men whose lives have trained them to convert discomfort into action immediately, and who find that having nothing to do with a feeling is worse than the feeling. That is worth knowing about yourself before you decide it is a failure of nerve.

And when the waiting ends it is never quite the event he built. It cannot be. He spent a week on it and I spent a moment. He is often quiet afterwards, working out that the best of it was already behind him.

I do not correct that. He will notice on his own, and next time he will wait differently, which is to say better.