“Just wait.” Since we were babies, we’ve heard this over and over. Wait for dinner. Wait until you’re older. Wait for me to finish. Wait until we get there. Wait for your birthday. Even when we grow up, we still have to wait. We wait for our ride. We wait for that vacation or that baby to be born. We wait until the time is right to get married or buy a house or change jobs or retire. Life is full of waiting.
Is all of this waiting a big waste of time? Is it something we just have to get through on our journey to that place we would rather be?
Our 21st century American culture certainly seems to think so. “Early access,” “skipping the line,” and “same day delivery” are all things people will pay extra for. When you ask someone about their day, many are quick to point out the time they spent waiting negatively: “I had to sit in traffic” or “the checkout line was long” or “my flight was delayed”. Similarly, people are positive when they don’t have to wait: “My train was on time” or “the doctor got me right in” or “my package was delivered early.” When we do have to wait, we are typically quick to pull out our phones, scrolling endlessly to numb the pain of having to wait. In our society, waiting is our nemesis. Time spent waiting is time spent holding us back from doing our next important thing in our busy, modern life.
Six years ago, on the feast of St. Nicholas, I completed my last chemotherapy session. I was thrilled that day to be finished with treatment and, a month later, to be declared in remission. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this joyful moment also set up one of the oddest tensions of waiting I can imagine: waiting for the cancer to return. Hairy Cell Leukemia is a chronic and incurable cancer. That means, statistically speaking, it is likely to come back some day. No one can say for sure if it will come back or exactly when it will come back, so we watch and we wait. Several times a year now, I go to visit the oncologist for blood tests and a check-up to see if it is returning. In the week or two leading up to the visit, inevitably my anxiety increases as I wait for my appointment. What if my numbers don’t look as good this time? What if it’s coming back? The anxiety increases even more as I wait in the lab and wait in the exam room and wait for my results and my doctor. Then, finally, the anxious waiting is over, and the doctor comes in to reassure me that all is well. I breathe a sigh of relief, say a prayer of gratitude, and settle down from my short-term anxious-about-my-appointment waiting back into my regular, long-term hoping-it-doesn’t-come-back waiting. For now, everything is ok. At least that is how they all have been for the last 6 years.
To live with a chronic cancer in remission is to live a life of waiting, except that unlike waiting in a checkout line, this is waiting you don’t want to hurry along. I wait for something I hope will never happen. My paradox is that I wait and hope for more waiting.
Advent, which we are in now, is a season of waiting. My seven year old daughter would be quick to tell you that Advent is about waiting for Christmas, and my ten year old son would be sure to add that it’s also about waiting for Jesus’ second coming (in a knowledgeable big-brother-I-told-you-so-little-sister kind of way). They are both right, of course, but as I have reflected on things this Advent, it seems to me that waiting is about more than just getting to that destination of Christmas and the Second Coming. My growing hunch is that there’s something more to waiting than just making it through to the end.
What if we flip our perspective on the time we spend waiting? What if we recognize that our life is still happening while we wait? What if waiting is actually a good part of our life, one that we can too easily overlook?
Unlike a movie we stream or a video game that we play, our life doesn’t pause when we wait. Our hearts keep beating. We keep breathing. The trees move in the breeze. Children play around us. People are doing things. While it may be tempting to think of our waiting time as a frozen moment, in fact life is still happening while we wait.
As a young adult, I used to like to say “patience comes to those who wait.” My early twenty-something sense of humor smirked at the wise-sounding tone barely masking a seemingly obvious statement. One thing my younger self missed, though, is that patience is a choice. You can spend your life waiting without developing patience. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that “patience comes to those who wait and choose to notice what is happening while they wait.”
For someone with a chronic cancer in remission like me, that time of patient waiting — the life in between — is a tremendous gift. That’s the time I’m spending watching my kids grow up and traveling with my wife and building important things in my career and developing a deeper faith and expanding my understanding of my Marianist identity and a whole host of other things — it’s my life. On my best days, I see that and am grateful for the opportunity to wait, whether it’s at the airport or in line somewhere, because I recognize that life is happening and that it’s a gift to be living it at that moment. (On far too many other days, though, I forget about this and am impatient and wanting everyone to hurry up and staring at my phone.)
Maybe there’s an invitation to all of us to change our perspective on waiting this Advent. After all, the season of Advent is longer than the season of Christmas. We spend more time waiting for Christmas than actually celebrating Christmas. Perhaps this perspective can help us embrace the waiting parts of our lives. Perhaps we can take a day or an hour or a single moment to notice the life that’s happening around us while we wait. Perhaps we’ll flip just one minute of frustrated waiting into a positive moment of appreciation. Perhaps even a single moment like this might be enough to help us prepare well for Christmas this year. If we get this right, we’ll be glad we stopped to wait for it.
Just wait.
A Hairy Witness 