Our Perception of the Act of Waiting

 

David Baily Harned continues his dialogue on patience by exploring assumptions related to it, the first being how we perceive, and thus value or devalue, the act of waiting:

In the past, Baily posits, waiting was a virtue of strength, not weakness:

"How else can we allow the future to emerge? The patience that waiting entailed was a great human act because it summoned the most distinctive powers of the self to their finest expression--vision and imagination, faith and hope, courage and prudence, humility and love.

"Today waiting remains no less a part of our lives than it ever was for our ancestors. But our assumptions about human nature and fulfillment have changed, and therefore our attitude toward waiting has changed as well. We see it less often as an opportunity, more often as a diminishing of the quality of our lives, a deprivation enforced upon us by an unfriendly environment. If reality can be more or less equated with everything we can manipulate and control, then does not the need to wait suggest a failure in ourselves? We have not yet found our place in the sun, nor achieved the mastery of our surroundings. Far from being one of the great human acts, waiting simply testifies that we have not won our struggle with the world. It tells us less about our strength than our weakness and lack of invention."

Harned says the result of this negative view of waiting is that we arrive at the conclusion that

"...waiting means there are voids in our universe, holes and tatters in what is intended to be the seamless fabric of our activity, and so we must do something with these empty spaces. They must be filled. If they are not, we shall become anxious or bored, which is the matrix for all sorts of destructive behavior toward others and toward oneself. If waiting is pointless, where can it end except in boredom unless it is relieved? The name of such relief is busyness...

"Busyness is important for two reasons. First, it is a distraction, diverting our attention from the need to wait, and so it contributes mightily to our self-esteem in a world where human significance is equated with doing things...

"The second reason is the role of busyness in expressing an impulse deeply written into our culture: the desire to believe that, no matter what, everything is all right. Busyness allows us to forget that the ordinary course of human affairs involves the sapping of our energy, our growing dependence upon the kindness of others, the inevitability of waiting, and yielding to forces far stronger than our own. In the end, what keeping busy means is quite simply the refusal...to look reality in the face. But this is also to turn from God, who is the ultimate reality..."      David Baily Harned, in Patience: How We Wait Upon the World