How to Wait Without Waiting

Update: link to Psychology Today published version

I just got back from my first time at Burning Man, that wild experiment where tens of thousands of people gather in an inhospitable desert for art, music, and the roll of the dice that is humanity. I expected nudity. I expected drugs and alcohol. I expected cool art and limited sleep. But here’s what I wasn’t prepared for: the waiting.

And yet, it was in that waiting that I found some wisdom I want to bring to my life and offer to you.

Immediacy

Even if we set aside the airports and buses to get there, once on the Playa I waited four hours to get our car out, while others waited up to 20 hours to get in, stuck in dust and mud. Workshops often started on “Playa time” (i.e., late). There were long lines for much-needed snacks and drinks. We gathered for hours to watch the Man burn and on more than one night, we hunkered down waiting for dust storms or downpours to pass.

At Burning Man, though, there’s a context: immediacy, one of the ten principles. Burning Man invites you—nay, implores you—to meet whatever the moment offers. That might mean stumbling on a lemonade and painting station, accepting a pickle from a stranger, or stepping into a tango workshop just because you happened to walk by. And yes, it also means practicing immediacy while standing in a long line.

I don’t need to tell you that waiting isn’t naturally pleasant. But to paraphrase Viktor Frankl, when we can’t change our circumstances, we still have one powerful option: change our perspective, and immediacy helps us do that.

Patience vs. Constancy

Jack Kornfield, one of my favorite meditation teachers, once noted that what we call patience is actually just disguised impatience: “patiently” tapping our foot, counting the minutes, silently judging until something happens.

Instead, he suggests constancy. Rather than waiting for life to begin, live that way now. Constancy means connection doesn’t happen when the workshop on authentic connection begins, it takes place in the line to get in.

And this is goes far beyond lines. It’s about all the other ways we tell the story that we are waiting for something else to happen: in doctors’ offices, in traffic jams, as part of a wedding party, in a church basement. We wait on test results, on the text back from a promising first date, to hear about whether we got the job, for the child, for the dream house.

I’ve felt it most in my quest for a life partner. Friends have partnered up and had kids, while I—at 39—haven’t yet. At times it’s made my life feel diminished, like it hadn’t really begun. That the Grand Canyon at sunrise or becoming a homeowner wasn’t as poignant without someone to share it with.

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Not Waiting Anymore

Constancy suggests a reframe: you want to love something, don’t wait for the person of your dreams, start right now with the strangers in line with you and the friends and friends by your side.

After the first hour in that exit line, I decided to stop waiting. I got out of the car and started talking to people. I shared peanut butter pretzels and heard about their journeys, what they’d learned, how they handled the storms. I saw people making mac and cheese mixed with pancake batter on the dust next to their car, a woman and her son passing out gummy bears and Ritz crackers, and a guy showing people their reflection in a silver ball.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I stopped feeling like I was waiting. I’d come to Burning Man to connect with like-minded people and that line became one final chance to do just that.

Four Ways to Stop “Waiting”

Here are a few suggestions for the next time you find yourself “waiting:”

1. Recognize the unpleasantness. Notice the restlessness. Yes, you want to get to the event, the doctor’s office, or through the traffic jam.
2. Do what you can. Catch the server’s eye, check the map, make a plan.
3. Broaden your perspective. Appreciate the AC in the car, the moment to breathe, the quirky humans in line with you.
4. Decide not to wait. Treat the blank space as life itself: start a conversation, pull out a book, listen to the birds.

Where Are You Waiting?

Luckily, if you will, you don’t need to go to Burning Man to experience waiting. Maybe you’re at the airport for a delayed flight or in line for a concert or yoga studio. Or maybe you’re waiting for the job, partner, or some other marker of “real life.”

A friend of mine, Pete, says he loves it when people are late (!). It gives him time to meditate, the time we all say we don’t have. He’s not waiting for them to arrive; he’s grateful for the extra minutes with his own mind and breath. This shift is deeply spiritual: he can’t change the situation, so he changes himself.

So what would it feel like to decide you’re not waiting anymore. That your life, dusty or otherwise, is unfolding right now, and the invitation is simply to be alive for it?

Bonus poem!

Within the body you are wearing

By Robert K. Hall

Within the body you are wearing, now
inside the bones and beating in the heart,
lives the one you have been searching for so long.

But you must stop running away and shake hands,
the meeting doesn’t happen
without your presence . . . your participation.

The same one waiting for you there
is moving in the trees, glistening on the water,
growing in the grasses and lurking in the shadows you create.
You have nowhere to go.
The marriage happened long ago.

Behold your mate.