Everyone treats waiting as wasted time. We skip the queue, we track the parcel, we refresh the page. A few seconds of loading and we already feel robbed.
And yet one of the most famous plays of the twentieth century is about nothing but waiting.
The play where nothing happens, twice
Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in French, as En attendant Godot, and it premiered in Paris in 1953, in a tiny theater on boulevard Raspail. Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a bare tree for someone called Godot. They talk, they bicker, they forget why they came, they decide to leave and don't move. Godot never arrives. One critic famously summed it up as a play in which nothing happens, twice.
Audiences have been watching them wait for more than seventy years. Perhaps because we recognize ourselves: always waiting for real life to begin, as if the in-between didn't count.
But what if the in-between is where the good part lives?
What anticipation does
Researchers have looked into this. A Dutch study of holidaymakers found that their happiness rose most before the trip, while they were looking forward to it, rather than after they came home. And psychologists at Cornell found that waiting for an experience, like a concert or a dinner, tends to feel like excitement, while waiting for something we bought tends to feel like impatience.
So waiting itself isn't the problem. It's what we're waiting for, and how we wait.
A house that waited
I grew up with a father who was a sailor, away at sea, and a mother raising three children mostly on her own. I wrote him letters. A letter was a way of being close to someone you couldn't reach any other way.
Letters teach a different kind of waiting. Not the anxious refreshing of a message that's late, but a slow, patient hope. You know it will come. You just don't know when.
How to wait well this week
Try this: give yourself something small to look forward to, and let it take its time.
- Write a letter to someone and post it today. Don't tell them it's coming. - Order a book from a little bookshop instead of having it delivered tomorrow. - Set aside one evening this week for something you love, and let yourself anticipate it.
Then, while you wait, notice the feeling. Is it impatience, or something sweeter? Name it. That's the meditation.
Something worth waiting for
The Letter & Magazine subscription was made for people who miss waiting. Each month, a letter and a postcard arrive in your mailbox, on paper, with a meditation and a story about art inside. Every season, a new issue of "(meditating) On Art" joins them. No notification will tell you it's on its way. One morning, it will simply be there.
Unlike Vladimir and Estragon, you won't be waiting for nothing.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi