Waiting

I have begun to feel differently towards the passing of time. I asked Ines if it feels like she is waiting for something, and she said, “I think in a way we are always waiting.” I did not ask her what we are waiting for: death, enlightenment, dinner, forgiveness, resolution, arrival; maybe it’s just the waiting that’s important.

We have meticulously removed waiting from modern life. We no longer have the patience to build a fire and cook dinner on its embers; “the present no longer trails things past and future along with it.”¹ Redwood trees, rivers, poetry, and whales: all that endures, all that lasts and is slow, threatens to disappear.

Along the rocky coast at low tide, we might remember how to linger. To linger is to endure. To linger is to resist the hyperkinesia that pervades us. As the sun warms the small pool of water, the snails slow their movements and begin to hold on to the rocks, and to each other, and to time. As the moon spins around us, we linger in doorways, in kelp forests, and in bed at the breathturn of day. These moments are our refuge.

A central question re-emerges: how do we find and cultivate exceptional, extraordinary places of duration? Boats, in their separateness and completeness, are a place of duration. When we step onboard and surrender everything, they re-connect us with ourselves. When we trim the sails with wind from another hemisphere, they re-connect us with the world. Time is the wind that flows around us. It curls in eddies behind the sails. It catches our hair and reminds us of its presence.

Across the evolution of life, when the world was covered in ice or ash, life persisted in steep valleys, hilltops hidden in the clouds, and islands untouchable by man. In my outward actions, I want to find places like these and protect them to facilitate life’s persistence. But in my inner life, what is needed is a certain kind of passivity. We need to let ourselves be concerned with that which evades us. To undergo an experience with something - be it a snail, a wave, a book, a stranger, or a god - means that this something “befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us.”² In our capacity for transformation, there is hope. Within ourselves, we can cultivate islands of duration. The refugia that I look for is within.

1. Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time

2. Martin Heidegger, The Nature of Language