Playspace: January 2007
On Waiting
Stuart Waite
One needs to become a professional waiter. Amateur waiters wait inside their emotions, they fret and worry and pine, and they focus on what they don’t have, rather than on what they do have. The professional waiter is more Zen, he or she waits inside their eternity. They sit and wait because it is in their nature to do so, nothing much moves them. They are detached from the tumbling mental scenarios usually associated with waiting.
Professional waiting usually deals with tangible things: planes, boats and trains, waiting for stuff to arrive. But beyond that there is the intangible, the unseen things we wait for. I term that “deep waiting”. It doesn’t involve logic; it is a form of waiting that asks you to hold an idea sacrosanct in your feelings knowing it will come to pass, when there is no logic of any kind to support the idea. It’s a kind of spiritual waiting, a deep sense of trust in God.
Deep waiting is a resonant faith that lays far inside your soul, it comes from an ancient remembering, we are so much wiser than our minds. From that ancient remembering we know that there is an unseen force that carries us along. It’s part of how grand everything is, but it is set in a place where we can’t really know or claim that grandness, not yet anyway. So we prove ourselves in the meantime by believing in the unbelievable and never despairing. I feel it is not so much what you wait for, it’s more the dignity you express while you are waiting. In the end, a divine order will emerge, it won’t let us down. It can't because we are that divine order, deep within.
Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws
him, and then choose that way with all his strength.
–Hasidic saying