The Art of Waiting

The Union Path Podcast - The Art of Waiting
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Just wait a minute. Just stop. Not yet. It's not ready. Hold on. Just wait.

A modern day philosopher once said, waiting is the hardest part.

There's so much truth in this. There's so much wisdom embedded in this idea, how hard it is to wait. How much effort it takes to wait. How difficult it is to sit in the place of absence, to sit in the place of lack. To sit and abide and acquiesce to something that we really want not being with us, not being in our lives, not being present.

So when we think about something like waiting, there really is an art to it. It really is both a talent and a skill. And these two things can be developed, like most other things that can be developed, through focused attention. Through focused intention to actually get better, to actually have an experience of waiting be of a higher quality, be something that at the very least is tolerable.

Striving to the point where, we actually don't ever feel like we're waiting for anything at all. That we can actually get to a point where we're so present, we're so in the moment, there is no sense of waiting. There is no sense of anything beyond what's currently happening.

But moving away from ideals, moving away from concepts that sound amazing, how do we actually do this? How do we actually make peace and find ways to calmly abide absence?

It's definitely a feature of the human animal that we not only have desires, but we have strong desires. Sometimes the strength of these desires can so totally overwhelm us that we'd look at our own behavior and say, that's not even me. I was overtaken by some presence that made me do something that wasn't actually me.

But of course, this isn't really the whole truth, right? We're always responsible for what we do. We always have agency.

Sometimes that agency isn't necessarily available in the moment, but we have agency after the fact. We can make up for things. We can make things right. We can change our behavior. We can alter the effects through further effort.

But these desires, even when they're incredibly strong, are still helpful, are still illuminating some sort of want, some sort of need, something on the path of ultimately where we really need to go. But this can get a little bit confusing. And sometimes desires are overly strong because they're pointing out a negative, they're pointing out something fundamental that's missing.

An unmet need, some sort of trauma or a past experience that's being triggered. That it's not that we should just do whatever our impulses say we should do, but we should always listen. We should always consider. We should always act with our full selves. Both on one hand with our logic and thinking and discernment, but on the other hand, with our feelings and emotions and intuitions. It's not one or the other, it's both.

A full life is found through integrating and expressing our full selves. A very partial life is lived through only considering and expressing a fractional part of ourselves, overly listening to the loudest parts of ourselves where the quiet parts of ourselves get ignored and left behind.

But when we want something and we're not completely taken over by that desire, there's always a liminal space. There's always an in-between. A space in between the want and the fulfillment.

Oftentimes the way we characterize and name this space is through waiting. And that waiting can feel all sorts of different ways. If it's something that's not very important to us, we don't really care about, where we don't even really notice. We may think from time to time, oh yeah right, this thing I wanted, hasn't happened yet. Oh well, either I'll do something else or onto the next.

Other times when there's something we really, really, really want, that waiting can feel far more charged, far more electric. It can cause us despair and pain. It can cause us anxiety. It can cause our stomachs to flip over and cause us worry and doubt.

So there really is an art of being able to traverse these times, these times in-between, that we're waiting. And there's a way to do it no matter what the desire is, from a peaceful, calm place.

Because if we're not peaceful or calm, if we're agitated, if we're overly keyed up and spun up over the absence of what we want, that usually indicates some sort of doubt or fear. That we have strong emotional reaction to something because we're scared.

We're scared this thing we want may never actually happen. We're scared that we don't actually deserve this thing we want. We're scared that someone else is gonna get it first. We're scared that even if we get it, we won't be able to keep it. We're scared that if this good thing happens, then something bad will be right on its tail and come in and wash everything away.

Although this fear is real, it doesn't mean it needs to be taken literally. Usually fear is indicating some sort of internal conflict, and these conflicts can be reconciled. These conflicts can be resolved.

We have to be willing to actually engage with them. We have to be willing to pay attention. We have to be willing to look underneath at the source of our feelings and reactions, and be willing to do something about root causes.

But when we're waiting for something, when we're looking for that calm and that peace, I believe the thing that's most important, the quality that's the most important to develop, is the quality of knowing.

Oftentimes, this is couched in a word like faith. Whatever we call it, it's a feature and a function of our consciousness. It's something we know. It's something we are. And usually when we have a lot of discomfort waiting, it means that that knowing, that part of our consciousness, isn't really fully there.

There's something missing. There's some incompleteness in our ideas and our beliefs around whatever it is about this thing that we want.

And so learning to develop this knowing, this faith, this consciousness, this being around what we want is usually the surest, shortest path to finding calm and peace about it. It's the most reliable path to learning to let things go, to be able to relax a bit.

Be able to actually focus on everything else that's happened to us. Because when we're frantically waiting for something, that eats up all of our attention. That squeezes out everything else in our life, because we become hyper focused on this blank space. On this as of yet to be experienced experience.

So when we're looking to develop and ease our times of waiting, getting to a place of knowing it's really critical, it's really helpful. But how do we do that? Oftentimes, these feelings of doubt, this fear, whatever is fueling this discomfort with the absence of what we want, a lot of times those things can run pretty deep.

Sometimes the beliefs and attitudes that are reinforcing this discomfort, seems like it's been a feature of our entire lives. But we can always get to things and heal them. On a consciousness level, we can always undo what's been done.

Our consciousness is malleable, it's flexible. Yes, it contains everything that's ever happened to us, but it also contains everything that happens to us from now on.

It's always readjusting. It's always recalibrating. It's always being modified based on the sum of our awareness. And when we start to have different awarenesses about things, we start to change our consciousness around those things. We modify past ideas and beliefs with new ideas and new meanings.

This is one of the best parts of being alive. This is one of the best parts of gaining spiritual awareness, is it really brings back an aspect of possibility to our life. It really brings back this concept that we're never really finished. It's never too late. There's always an access point to create positive change, and there's always a perfect time to start. Fortunately, that time is very often now.

That as soon as we realize something, as soon as that desire for change wells up from within us, that's the time to start. That's the time to start moving in that direction, that's the time to start leaning in that direction.

That's the time to start thinking different thoughts. That's the time to start doing different things, knowing that over time these different thoughts and actions will accrete and accumulate to a different experience.

But this is the journey of life, building the ability to wait comfortably. It's just like building any other capability. It takes practice. It takes time. And it all starts with the intention. It takes the desire to be different. It takes the desire to experience something different.

And when we think about waiting, and we think about there really is an art to it, we can start to think about our own relationship with waiting. When we look at ourselves, when we're really honest in our self-awareness, what are we like as a waiting person? Are we easy-going or are we neurotic? Do we let things go easily or do we hold on with death grips?

Looking at how we wait can really tell us a lot about ourselves. Because oftentimes how we do one thing is how we do a lot of things. Sometimes how we do one thing is how we do everything.

And so like any other facet of self-awareness, we really learn a lot about ourselves by paying attention. By paying attention, and then really being honest about what we see. Striving to really see and hear and feel the truth. Really be able to connect with what is, on as deep of a level as we can possibly access.

We build and improve our relationship with waiting just like we build and improve our relationship with anything through truth, through awareness.

And when we do look at the ways that we wait, and we find fear, anxiety, doubt, lack of faith, lack of confidence, lack of knowing, these are all things we can change.

That's what's so amazing about encountering the truth. Is that when we know something is so, that in and of itself changes our consciousness. That in and of itself changes our behaviors.

We can't not know things that we know. So knowing more and more can't help but change us, can't help but affect us in myriad ways, both subtle and profound.

And so we think about something like waiting, living in these in-between times, in-between spaces, we seek to be calm and peaceful, not as some sort of manipulation, not as some sort of cudgel. Like, boy, if I can just let this thing go, then this thing I want will come to me even faster.

No, we're not trying to trick anybody here. We're not trying to find some sort of hack that'll make this thing I want happen through some sort of back door manipulation. No, when we let go, we really need to let go.

And when we try to trick ourselves into thinking we let go, well, that's just a different kind of holding on, that's just a different kind of resistance. Similarly, it doesn't do us a lot of good to pretend that we've let go, to pretend that we're calm and peaceful.

At the very least, getting caught up in something like the spiritual bypass around faked non-resistance and equanimity, well that's just leading us further astray, because that's not the truth.

In some ways those are cheats to get us out of the present moment, to get us out of feeling, to get us out of awareness.

And at the very least, by not connecting with the truth, we're not really doing anything about the underlying feelings that we have. We're not really doing anything to assuage and heal our anxiety, our fear. We're just glossing over it. We're just applying a fresh coat of paint to our uncomfortable feelings and pretending like things are fixed.

So when we experience discomfort, when we experience internal conflict, the only way to resolve these things is to go into them. Is to listen, is to pay attention, is to feel. Because no matter how uncomfortable these feelings are, they are messages ultimately, messages for us.

There's something to be learned, there's something to be gained through the awareness embedded in these feelings.

And it doesn't mean if we can't force peace and equanimity and calm, that we'll never be able to. It doesn't mean that if we have a hard time waiting for something that we'll always have a hard time waiting.

It means there's work to do. It means there's something to discover here. There's something to learn. There's some direction we need to grow. That's exactly what these sensations are inviting us to do.

We can learn to have knowing and faith through learning to experience, knowing and faith. We can learn it through self-awareness. We can learn it through positive experience. We can try, we can try to have a little more knowing, a little more faith and see where that gets us, and then use that development to do it a little more.

Oftentimes when we're trying to make change in our life, it can feel like an all or nothing thing. That we're either miserable or happy. But of course, there's infinite shades of gray in between those two states, and it's much more important that we're making progress towards what we want to experience than we've gotten there in one step.

Sometimes things just take time. Learning is hard. Growth can be painful. Struggle often comes along for the ride. But the important thing is that we listen. The important thing is that we pay attention. The important thing is that we take the steps in front of us to reach the goal, to reach the ideal that we want to experience eventually.

The most important thing is to keep going. The most important thing is to keep going with awareness. With being honest about where we are and where we want to go.

So when we develop our abilities to wait, and when we've done the inner work to develop our faith and our knowing, great progress with this usually comes to us. But it comes to us in a funny way. Comes to us in a subtle way of where we realize it in hindsight, like, huh, there's this thing I want, I really want, and it isn't happening, but I don't feel tortured about it. In fact, I haven't really thought about it at all.

That's an amazing experience, that's quite a breakthrough, if you've been the kind of person to just constantly be tapping your fingers on the table, staring at your watch and demanding where is it?

But this is all possible through knowing, through shifting our consciousness. From shifting our consciousness from a place of lack to a place of having.

Because that's all comfort with waiting really is right? Is the knowing usually of one of two things. One, this thing I want is coming to me eventually. Two, this thing I want, if it doesn't come to me, well then maybe I don't actually want it, maybe it's not actually for me. Either way, in the meantime, I can let it go.

When we get to the things we want, the things we're waiting for with this type of consciousness, that in and of itself takes the suffering away. That knowing is the key to be able to wait in peace. To have waiting be easy. To have waiting, not even be something we really think about, we're not even really that conscious of.

That when we're tortured by waiting, that's the shift we're going for. We're looking to shift into knowing. We're looking to shift into being, in being the thing we want before it even shows up.

And building that trust, that trust with ourselves, that trust with life, that we want what we want for a reason, and that things find us for a reason. And that reason is based on who and what we are, is a reflection of the consciousness that we bring to it.

And so if we want to wait comfortably, if we want to make these in-between times of our lives much easier, often the most important thing to do is to work on ourselves, work on our own knowing. Work on our own confidence, knowing what is meant to happen to us will happen to us.

And that isn't to say that everything that happens to us will be us having to eat our vegetables of learn a lesson and grow and struggle and strain and suffer. It's like, no. It's like we feel joy for a reason, we feel delight for a reason. We're supposed to experience these things. But most importantly, we want what we want for a reason.

That these desires that we feel, especially the desires deep inside of us, are leading us to a greater whole, a greater wholeness of self. And so it's important that we listen. It's important that we pursue.

But that pursuit, that going after what we want, it really is an art form. It really is something that we can always get better at. We can always find some fear in there somewhere. We can always find some resistance in there somewhere. No matter how subtle, it's still there, then we can always work to get better and better. That's the beauty of it. It never ends.

So when we do develop this knowing, when we do develop this faith, when we do develop this confidence, truly we can relax, we do relax. We do find a sense of joy and peace and ease. We do completely renegotiate our relationship with waiting, and when we do, we can be so much more aware of everything else that's going on. We don't have to let this waiting completely suck the air out of the room, completely run rough shod over our lives and our experience. We can actually live a fuller life. We can actually be a lot more aware, and live a lot fuller in the meantime.

Because the thing about life, it's almost all meantime. It's almost all in-between one thing and another.

And we find the best path to walk in between by being as calm and as peaceful as possible. We live our best mean times when we live them fully, we live them awarely, and we live them consciously.