Wait, Wait!

Tom Petty was right. The waiting is the hardest part.

This is why instant gratification is so addictive. And lord knows we have that by the bullet train load these days.

We can order food, clothing, or furniture with the click of a button. We can find out how to change our brake light with a five-second internet search.

We can watch movies or binge television series anytime we want. We can even make appointments with the DMV, so we don’t have to sit there for half a day.

Much of the world has been crafted to be on-demand. And of course this makes life better in lots of ways.

But Eckhardt Tolle is also right, when he says most people still spend their whole lives in the waiting room.

How can this be? With everything at our fingertips and delivered at supersonic speed?

Think about it though, doesn’t most of your life feel like preparation for something? Buying groceries, cooking food, cleaning the kitchen. Buying clothes, washing clothes, drying clothes, folding clothes, choosing which clothes to wear, putting on the clothes.

Choosing a car, buying insurance for the car, putting gas in the car, driving you or someone else somewhere, and then coming back from the going, parking the car.

Going to work, starting work, trying to finish a project or report or study or whatever, or watching the clock while you do something that feels mundane, and then leaving work and driving home. Where you likely will start pulling food out of the fridge to make something you will soon have to clean up. Unless you had to stop at the grocery store first.

Yes, there are moments where we are fully present. In the zone or the flow, as it is described. There are activities that are more conducive to that state, athletics, art, sex, conversation, meditation. Still, the vast majority of our lives are not spent in that state.

I spent years and years in a situation where I craved solitude because I had almost none of it. Now that I am a single parent of a teenager who mostly has his own life, I often have the solitude I craved. And guess what? I want something else. I want connection, community, intimacy, conversation.

It never ends. The wanting to not be where we are. The waiting. For life.

Whatever that means.

I think, like happiness, we have to re-define life. What is life, exactly? Apparently a big part of life is folding laundry and getting ourselves ready to go to school and work. And keeping ourselves nourished and slept so we can do those things.

Only a tiny fraction of life is sex and vacations and amazing meals with friends and winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

So, we must need to shift our definition of life. Life is also all the little things. Life is folding the laundry. It is making yummy food for you family and friends. But also for yourself. Life is mindfully cleaning up your living spaces. Life is watering your plants.

And it is also giving a smile to someone you don’t know, letting someone into your lane in heavy traffic, choosing the best blueberries in the store, and really listening to someone you love talk about something you don’t really are about.

My point, I think, if I have one, is that we really don’t have to wait for life at all. It is all around us all the time in every little thing we do.