Waiting Is a Revelation

The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 1

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture and the moral life. And happy New Year. This installment took shape in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, each associated with waiting, although the seconds we count down to midnight are rather different from the days some of us might count down to Christmas. In any case, this piece is about waiting. It is an attempt to reframe waiting as something other than tedious and wasteful, indeed, as something potentially life-giving. As always, I hope these reflections are valuable to you. Thank you for reading. And may this new year, inevitably laden with its frustrations and sorrows, also bring you joy and peace.

“Waiting is not a passage of time to be traversed but a condition of our being … an opportunity to encounter those aspects of life deeply, perhaps neurotically, hidden in our busyness. In waiting, in listening to the inward melody of duration, we become attuned to our being.”

— Harold Schweizer, “On Waiting”

I’m writing a couple of days after Christmas, and thus on the other side of the season of Advent. For those unfamiliar with the rhythms of the Christian liturgical calendar, Advent spans the four Sundays leading up to Christmas Day. Chiefly, it is a season of waiting, recalling and re-enacting an ancient anticipation of a long-expected Savior. The affective register of the season is characterized by patient longing, sober reflection, and resilient hope. Today, of course, this ancient tradition competes and mostly loses out to an alternative liturgical season that tends to be marked freneticism, exhaustion, and, too often, emptiness.¹ Yet despite this, the spirit of ardent and even enchanted expectation seems to linger in the childhood experience of Christmas, even when it is observed in strictly secular contexts.²

Maybe it is because my own children have been especially eager for the arrival of Christmas this year. Maybe it’s because I recently learned that Amazon announced it would be piloting 30-minute deliveries in Philadelphia and Seattle, and I’m old enough to remember when the standard window for delivery of goods ordered by mail was six to eight weeks, which was occasionally long enough to forget that had you ordered anything at all! Whatever the case, I’ve been thinking about that practice of waiting and how unusual periods of sustained waiting have become.

There’s no particular virtue in waiting six to eight weeks for the delivery of goods, of course, but I find myself wondering whether certain virtues might be encouraged by the practice of waiting—patience, say, or prudence—and that certain vices, rashness or prolifigacy, are abetted by the eclipse of waiting as an ordinary element of everyday life. Mostly, though, I believe we can come to see instances of waiting as freighted not merely with frustration but also with possibility.

Maybe it’s a bit much to speak about the eclipse of waiting, but the example of shrinking delivery times is just one of the many instances in which the space between desire and fulfillment or impulse and satisfaction has been effectively collapsed.³ Alongside such cases, we might also consider the pervasive availability of distraction and stimulation which has altered the phenomenology of waiting in those instances where we might still be required to wait, even if only briefly. The Pavlovian move to pick up the smartphone when stopped at a red light comes to mind as an example of the latter.

So what exactly does it mean to wait? Why are we so determined to avoid waiting? Is the state of waiting something that ought to be avoided whenever possible? Is there any good that can come from waiting?

Before moving on, it is worth acknowledging that the set of experiences I’m exploring are far from universal. It is those of us with sufficient resources who will be most likely to eliminate times of waiting, and often by being waited on by those who cannot afford not to wait. Moreover, it is also true that there are forms of waiting that cannot be so easily avoided by any of us and that we wouldn’t wish for ourselves or our neighbor: waiting for justice, waiting for a cure, waiting for love, etc. But perhaps it is precisely because these latter forms of waiting impose themselves upon us that it is worth considering how our techno-economic milieu structures and conditions our everyday experience of waiting. It is in and through such ordinary experiences, after all, that we end becoming ourselves.⁴

When I think about the experience of waiting, I remember that the seventeenth-century polymath and proto-existentialist Blaise Pascal once suggested that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” This is one of the paradigmatic scenes of waiting in my imagination. In our age of perpetual digital distraction, this line is frequently quoted as a prescient rebuke of our contemporary habits. Yet the fact that Pascal wrote long before anyone ever dreamed of a smartphone tells us that there’s something deeper at play in the human psyche, something that precedes the ubiquitous availability of distractions (or diversions, as Pascal called them) and which in fact constitutes an activity as a distraction. After all, an activity is only a diversion or distraction if by it we consequently fail to give our attention to that which rightly demands it of us.

But if we were to look for that line among his Penseés, we would find that Pascal’s insight does not translate quite so straightforwardly to our distraction-addled circumstances. He seems to have in mind something more general: contentment with one’s overall situation rather than abiding solitary stillness. Because a person cannot be content with their situation, even after they have achieved a reasonable and modest degree of prosperity, they go off in search of diversions: gambling, games, adventure seeking, invading a neighboring town, and the like.⁵ Thus does the malcontent stir up all manner of trouble in the world. However, this seems not to tell us very much about the experience of waiting, solitary or otherwise.

But as Pascal develops his line of thought, his analysis does seem to speak more directly to the experience of waiting, or, more specifically, to why it is that we grow impatient with waiting.⁶

“On further consideration, when, after finding the cause of all our ills, I have sought to discover the reason of it,” Pascal writes, “I have found that there is one very real reason, namely, the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely.”

In other words, the human condition can be tough to bear, and, if at all possible, we’d rather not think about it. In moments of solitude and stillness, however, this is precisely where our minds tend to go. It is in these unfilled moments that we may find ourselves becoming acutely aware of our anxieties, failures, and fears, our loneliness and desperation, the futility of our labors, and, naturally, our mortality. It’s why we can’t abide solitude and stillness, and why Pascal believes we are so quick to turn to diversions. When we are not diverted or distracted, either legitimate or frivolous activities, then we begin to feel time and in this way our being comes into focus. In these moments we become an object of thought to ourselves, and we sustain our own gaze about as well as we do the uncomfortable gaze of others. Self-reflection of this sort, inflicted rather than chosen, in which the self is encountered not as a project or projection, but with disconcerting clarity—this kind of self-reflection can be intolerable.⁷

A later French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who developed an account of time as duration, explored the experience of waiting, along complimentary lines. In his discussion of Bergon’s work, literary scholar Harold Schweizer, puts it this way:

“In saying that he cannot protract or contract time ‘á volonté,’ as he would like, Bergson states the obvious: that the person who waits cannot defer or prolong, shorten or lengthen—his being. In waiting, the waiter thus feels—impatiently—his own being: it is a feeling of the un-measurable, perhaps immeasurable, that which cannot be protracted or contracted.”⁸

“In other words,” Schweizer continues, “we experience time only then when it is not exactly calibrated to the will, when it is other than, or in conflict with, how we thought time should run.” In these moments time is “slow and thick.”

In Schweizer’s elaboration of Bergson, there lies an implicit perspective on the relationship between waiting and agency: when we wait, we do so because we cannot do otherwise, time is out of sync with our will. There are two directions in which we can take this. In the first instance, this seems obviously correct. We wait because we must. But in this first case there is a further distinction to be made.⁹ We can imagine cases were it would be right and good for us not to wait should we have the power to calibrate our time to our will. In other words, we can imagine cases of imposed waiting, which might be rightly judged to be unjust. The one who is wrongly imprisoned waits to be vindicated and must bear up under this waiting occasioned by injustice. Or, we might also imagine a person seeking life-saving treatment (whom we aptly call a patient), but who must wait for the machinations of an insurance company and a hospital bureaucracy to determine whether they will receive the care they require. There is in such cases a form of resilient, if also indignant, waiting that must be practiced, but it would be better if they were not made to wait.

But there are also cases in which we wait against our will, and in which it would be unjust of us to force the calibration of our will and our time. I am thinking here of cases where we wait on others whose will and desires might be at odds with our own. To wait when our will is out of accord with the will of others, even when we might have the power to impose our own desires, is both just and good. This is a way of honoring our neighbor and respecting the integrity of their desires. We might think of this as a form of civic waiting, a virtue appropriate to the responsibilities of freedom in a pluralistic society. We might also think of similar situations that unfold in more private contexts such as romantic relationships. In such cases, patient waiting is simply the shape love takes in relation to the other. To wait is to relinquish the desire to exert power, to achieve mastery, or to seek control in cases where such efforts would destroy the very goods that we desire.

But I’m not sure that all forms of waiting can be understood as instances in which we must wait because we must. In other words, not all forms of waiting imply a negative relation to power and agency. For his part, Schweizer, elsewhere in his book, suggests that “we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.”

We can describe waiting as a condition that is, as it were, imposed from above, but it is also possible to describe urgency, hurry, and immediacy as conditions imposed from above. In such cases, waiting could be conceived of both as a form of resistance and as a warranted insistence on the space for deliberation and reflection, which are the preconditions of freedom. Many of us live under the conditions of the just-in-time economy, that is to say of a techno-economic order that thrives when we feel ourselves deprived of the time and freedom to so order our lives that we are not lured into availing ourselves of the costly, last-minute conveniences proffered by the digital marketplace.¹⁰ Under these conditions, waiting, while not without its own costs, is power.

We can also frame such waiting as a resistance to what I have elsewhere described as the enclosure of the human psyche. But to get there, let’s backtrack just a bit. It seems to me that there is a family resemblance between Pascal’s explorations of a spiritual restlessness that cannot abide inactivity and Bergson’s elision of waiting and being. In both cases, we come painfully close to something more basic and real than the illusions with which we ordinarily make do.

To put matter this way recalls how the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch conceived of freedom as a liberation from fantasy, which she defined as “the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images.” “It is in the capacity to love, that is to see,” Murdoch argued, “that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists.” And this liberation from fantasy begins with “attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.” Thus, in her account, “freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action.”

The line from waiting to the form of freedom as contact with the real that Murdoch is advocating runs through attention. Accurate vision, a form of seeing that is indistinguishable from love in its selflessness and which generates a freedom from fantasy and for action, arises from attention, which following Simone Weil, Murdoch defined as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” “It is a task to come to see the world as it is,” Murdoch acknowledges, and that task is chiefly the task of patiently and lovingly paying attention. Which is why Schweizer writes that “waiting, as the French activist and philosopher Simone Weil advocates, must be relearned as a form of attention.”¹¹

Thus we might say that waiting is what one is made to do, but also what one may choose to do, and in that choosing, a choosing “not to do,” there is power, and it is, paradoxically, a power that enables our choosing “to do.”

Put less enigmatically, a moment of waiting is not necessarily wasted time; it is a moment of potential. To seize and capture a moment for waiting against the imperatives of efficiency and time-saving is to secure a space of psychic liberation in which the virtues of patience and loving attention can be cultivated. Or, as Schweizer put it, “If we claim our experience of waiting rather than being merely subjected to it, we resist the commercialization of time, we own our time, we make time matter—we matter.”

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once observed that “the essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry.” Also, in relation to art, Schweizer spoke on behalf of the revelatory power of “waiting on rather than waiting for, special way of waiting, lingering rather than waiting.” “In this lingering,” he argued, “things make their brief appearance.”

I would only add that such tarrying and waiting, which discloses the depths of the work of art to our consciousness, is just as effective in the realm of our ordinary experience as it is in the presence of the work of art. To tarry or to linger at the table, the park bench, the shore, or even busy city street is to invite the things of our common world to make their appearance. It is to learn to see independently of our desire to do as we ought. It is to unlearn the impatience born of the desire to master, predict, and control the world that is first and always a gift.

Reading Schweizer’s book, I discovered the lovely notion of “Sabbath eyes” articulated by Theodor Adorno in his Minima Moralia. “The eyes that lose themselves to the one and only beauty are sabbath eyes,” Adorno wrote. “They save in their object something of the calm of its day of creation.”

Sabbath eyes, in Schweizer’s lovely summation, are eyes that “rest on their object.” May we strive to see with such eyes in this new year.

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1. This alternative liturgical season commences on the holy day of Black Friday, which is now effectively a season in its own right, extending in anticipatory fashion to early November and thus absorbing Thanksgiving, which, recalcitrantly premised on gratitude, continues to elude robust commercialization and is thus best ignored.

2. “Waiting is an enchantment.” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse.

3. In certain cases it may be better to say that the space has been collapsed between a desire and the simulation of its fulfillment, an occurrence which then begins to reconstitute the nature of the desire.

4. Regarding the moral dimensions of ordinary experience, I appreciated Terry Eagleton’s recent appreciation of Jane Austen: “Previous novelists tended to deal in epic characters and events, but Austen is one of the first English writers to find moral significance in such minor but critical matters as remembering to light a fire for someone in their bedchamber, or failing to wait for a companion who has gone off to fetch you a key. What the Henry Fieldings of this world would scarcely have noticed becomes of momentous importance to an author on whom nothing is lost.” To be a person on whom nothing is lost—this speaks not only to Austen’s perceptive genius but also to the dimension of waiting which amounts to a form of attentiveness.

5. One could do worse than reading Pascal in order to gain some insight into the ascent of digitized gambling that kyla scanlon and Derek Thompson among others have written about this past year: “This man spends his life without weariness in playing every day for a small stake. Give him each morning the money he can win each day, on condition he does not play; you make him miserable. It will perhaps be said that he seeks the amusement of play and not the winnings. Make him then play for nothing; he will not become excited over it, and will feel bored. It is then not the amusement alone that he seeks; a languid and passionless amusement will weary him. He must get excited over it, and deceive himself by the fancy that he will be happy to win what he would not have as a gift on condition of not playing; and he must make for himself an object of passion, and excite over it his desire, his anger, his fear, to obtain his imagined end, as children are frightened at the face they have blackened.”

6. For a bit more documentation of our uneasiness with waiting, you can read this 2024 essay by Christine Rosen: “The Lost Art of Waiting.” Thanks to Ruth Gaskovski for the link.

7. For example: “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.”

8. This quotation, as well as much of what follows, is from Schweizer’s entry in the Thinking In Action series, On Waiting.

9. Some of you may notice here an echo of the late Albert Borgmann’s distinction between troubles we accept in practice but not in principle and those we accept in practice and in principle.

10. The “costliness” maybe variously understood: the literal money spent, but then also the personal and social costs of becoming more dependent on the goods and services we must pay to procure rather that what we might be able to do for ourselves or what we might provide for others in our community and, in turn, rely on others to provide for us. Along these lines, compare Douglas Rushkoff on borrowing a drill and saving the world.

11. Or, as Maurice Blanchot, also riffing on Weil, has put it, “Attention is waiting: not the effort, the tension, or the mobilization of knowledge around something with which one might concern oneself. Attention waits.”