On Waiting

But what was I waiting for? Maybe I was waiting for the confusion oil to run dry in the mental engine? Maybe I was waiting for you?

Waiting is not something we do incredibly well. We're always trying to eschew the vulnerability of the thoughtless moment, where the meaning of life gets sucked into the Taoist wei wu wei--the actionless activity of the actively actionless. We eschew this because we fear the absence of meaning. In the absence of meaning, the meaningless void, we expect to find the hyperbanal or a place of static peace. So in order to avoid the meaningless void, we don't even bother waiting...we try to do! And do we must! We must, from the moment we slam our fists on our vexing alarm clocks to the moment we fall asleep like fallen trees, do things and do them well. Without doing we assume we will die in our flesh, yet continue to inhabit our flesh for years to come. We assume we will become vegetables.

"Adam: What will this apple do to me?
Tree: Why don't you ask the apple. Let me be."

Even when we appear to be waiting (ie: for a friend, for a bus), we aren't actually waiting. Although the body seems inert, or least feels comfortably numb while sitting or standing, the mind is always running. Because we don't have to act on every cognitive impulse, we wear the mask of waiting, yet we aren't yet waiting. Our eyes move back and forth like hapless pinballs in a solipsist arcade. We're subtly jittery. Our thoughts are trying to traverse the unexplored terrain of the day that hasn't precipitated yet. In other words, we're doing and we're trying to do things extremely well.

"When I wait, truly wait for something, I panic. Is that feeling natural for the mind that waits?"

Much of our aversion to waiting seems to stem from unconscious processes or least involuntary ones. Everything is moving in our bodies, so why try to amaranthinely place down the obelisk of aberration in a land of conformity, a land of doing? It will only create a discontinuity in the great race of continuity. It will only obliterate the aversion to waiting. Don't! (Sarcasm, right?)

"The Hindus call the fourth state of consciousness 'turiya'. You can only reach it by waiting."

We also don't like waiting because it is very traumatic for us. Just think about this: we were waiting in a womb for nine months. Just waiting. Then we were wrested from the Eleusis of the womb, the quiescence of profound waiting, and plopped into this outside world of doing. The moment we try to profoundly wait, we dredge up the mawkish moments of our birth. We try to eschew the trauma by committing ourselves to drama. In other words, we do and we try "to do" things extremely well.

"Cracks form, winds blow
Weeds grow from the places we least expect
When the dawn awakens, the droplets shiver.
I will shine on them all in splendor.
My shameless rays."- The Waiting Sun

Waiting is not an integrated facet of society; it doesn't take a form in the industrious credos of the Paternalistic Mind. It is very intuitive and all-embracing--the ying of the wick as opposed to the yang of the flame. This is why we don't talk about it in the universities. Waiting is an untenable state of mind for any university because a university is constructed around doing. This is why our understanding of the big K--Knowledge--is very biased and partial. When we only see the do in the ingness of our lives, we banish the intuitive state of waiting from our mental landscapes. We grow sick because we accumulate too many facts, too many disjointed piles of erudition shrapnel. We lose touch with the poetic touch, the waiting of the word.

"I wait in love and watch the sky do the same. I see that it isn't so hard. This love thing isn't so hard. It is more be than do."