The art of Waiting.

I have been sitting in a season of waiting since I have returned home and to be quite honest it has been the worst kind of torture for someone like me. Motion has been my default setting since I was a child. Easily distracted or hyper-fixated. Eyes constantly watching everything. Meerkat like or so I have been told. But in this moment I am learning about what it means to move through time that is not yours to control and will not bend for any of your whims or proddings. I like movement. Inertia. consistency and routine. I like having something to do with my hands, my mind, my body. I like when the days are filled, even with things that I do on my own, but the calendar is filled nonetheless. Something happens to me when I stagnate, when the inertia runs out and everything grinds to a halt. When the Lord throws me a big red stop sign and forces me to decelerate. to stop and pay attention. to stop rushing or in my case, to just stop moving for a little while. When he forces me to wait.

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I would like to preface this by saying that when I talk about a waiting season, I don’t mean waiting a week for a job to respond or waiting at the most a month for some new door to open. I mean waiting for months on end, for a year or even for years for that one door you have been praying for to finally crack open. I mean a waiting season that means sleepless nights, break downs when faced with the utter emptiness of uncertainty. I mean the kind of waiting that costs you every single bit of mental, emotional and even physical fortitude. The kind of waiting where you know that if you slip up for one moment, when you doubt for one little moment, it will send you spiralling so far, you don’t know how you are going to get back to the beginning. That’s what I mean about a waiting season.

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Now, I enjoy life and all of its little intricacies. Cocktails with friends. Book shopping. I like working and being busy. I like when my days are filled with things to do. There is a restlessness that comes when I don’t have all of those things. When all I can do in my day is sit at my desk and figure out what to do with all of this time I have on my hands. It makes me unruly on the inside. waspish to myself. internal organs roiling about like the churning waters of the ocean. nothing really settling until all that energy has somewhere to go. These waiting seasons for me have always come off the back of some kind of transition. When you move from one job to another, one moment in life to another. One country to another. When life stops looking like it did in the past but you don’t know what’s ahead in the story. Those pages between where you were and where you are going to be is full of this unending waiting.

You wait when you apply for jobs, when you send out emails asking for freelance work. When you message friends and hope to hear back. When you put yourself out there. It is always movement followed by waiting. You send out something and then you wait. wait for a decision. Wait for them to decide that you are who they are going to take the chance on. wait even for that rejection email that says thanks but no thanks. just an endless stream of waiting, hoping, failing, trying and then waiting again.

I wish that waiting came easy to me. That I could be that person who moves like liquid through life. Who eases their way into purpose. But I am who I am. I grew up in one of the fastest cities in the world. I have hard working workaholic parents who don’t do rest very well. I am asian, so efficiency and accuracy seems to somehow be built into the bones of my people. All these things added together means that I walk fast, I talk fast and I get annoyed when people walk slowly on the sidewalk. But living in Sydney has added a strange new layer to my person. A kind of defiance to movement layered on top of a need to constantly be moving. living in a country as laid back as Australia has certainly forced me to move at a different pace. It taught me to move like they do, or risk missing out on moments. taught to how it was just as important to sit down for hours at the beach with friends and cold glasses of wine on a Summer afternoon. It taught me that work was work and life was life and that work was just how you funded your life and not the other way around. It taught me about seasons and adapting to each one. In winter you slowed down, you walked and eased your way through life. You curled up on couches with friends or a good book. You let the early nights lull you into deep sleep. Then in summer you awakened. You languished in the shade of the big trees. You were sticky with sweat and smoothie residue, and your curls salt crusted from being in the water. Skin tanned to golden brown. Shopping for matching bikini’s with friends. It taught me about the slow rise of spring and easy fall into autumn. it taught me to wait for that first 35 degree day that signalled that beach season was upon us. It taught me to wait for that first chill which meant it was time for the heating to come on. So there in that big brown land, my body exhaled and settled in the sun soaked ways of the people there. But a part of me would never lose that ability for movement no matter how often I learnt to languish.

It is almost like all of those lessons have been forgotten in the wake of moving back home. To this country with no seasons. Just endless sunshine and humidity. To rainstorms in the morning and bright hot sunshine in the afternoon. To this place where I either match pace with everyone or risk getting run over by some enthusiastic woman running for the doors of the train. either I follow their pace, their momentum or I run the risk of getting left behind. But that newly added layer of me insists on rising up in rebellion. I don’t like it when people tell me what to do. So when society tells me that I need to speed up, everything in me refuses to do so and so I am left in this strangle little bubble of my own making. Where I am both slow and fast at the same time and my kind of waiting is somehow a byproduct of that. it is the place where my mind says right now, but the heart reminds me that rushing has never done anyone any world of good, and rushing is how you make mistakes. So I live now in this weird state of both movement and waiting. It is a strange concept to try and put into words.

To be in a place where you are waiting but also moving at the same time. Where you make little moves and hope that this tiny stone of movement will be able to disrupt the serene glass face of waiting and excite it into something that equals more movement, hopefully sometime this week… but until that movement comes, you wait. But something I have learnt about waiting is that it is not like what everyone thinks it is. it is not this endless monotony of the days just passing you by like the moving images seen from a train window (although there are some days like that). waiting I have found, when done right, will always be about you and who you are becoming. I have dealt with so much of my own shit during a waiting season than I would have if I was busy, simply because I have the time. this waiting, for me at least, has always been about transforming from the person I was, who may not be able to handle what’s coming, into the person who can and that kind of transformation will always take time.

And so these seasons come with transformation in mind. I have learnt that the longer I put it off, the longer the season extends. The longer I try to remain the person of yesterday, the more I will have to wait. I am not saying it is easy. Everything about transformation is hard. But the longer you put it off, the worst it gets. Like a wound that festers. the longer you let the infection remain, the more painful it will be to dig the infection out and heal the wound afterwards. So why not spare yourself unnecessary pain by dealing with it now?

So I have learnt to get better at waiting. I am not an expert by any means. I still don’t like it. Don’t ask me to wait in line for anything or to walk slowly. I just can’t do it. But I have learnt to see the season for what it is and start paying attention to the things that it starts to bring out in me. Maybe one day I will wake up and somehow realise I have become an expert at waiting, at patience. But I don’t think I will. I think all I will learn is to realise quickly what the season is and start doing the work of waiting well.

So cheers with a martini to waiting and waiting well. May we all learn the art of it.