Notes From Jon

[note: I found this on my iPaq the other day from when we were traveling to Africa this past summer. I'd forgotten it was there, but I was glad to find it again.]

I get some of my best writing done in airports. I’m not sure why that is… I think it’s because when I’m in an airport, I’m usually waiting on something. I think a lot when I’m waiting.

Waiting affords us the chance to think a little more deeply about things than we usually do. I think we’re lost the art of waiting, much like we’re lost the art of silence. We don’t like silence anymore – when things are quiet, we start to think, start to deal with the stuff that’s going on in our heads. Waiting is the same way – it gives us time to think, so we would rather occupy ourselves another way: shopping, listening to music, reading a book, just walking around the airport. We can’t just sit still and think and wait.

There’s something about “active waiting” that makes us come to terms with what we’re waiting on. I’m waiting to get on an airplane for a long journey. And up until now (after a 24-hour weather delay), I haven’t had time to sit and realize how much I’ve been looking forward to this trip. I’ve been waiting, hoping, expecting. And now the time is almost here. Just sitting still for these few minutes has helped me see more clearly what I’m waiting on, what I expect and hope to happen. It’s a moment of active waiting, and I think it will make the moment – when it arrives – even more clear and special because I really took time to WAIT for it.

Come to think of it, we spend a good deal of our lives waiting on something – actively or passively. I’m not just talking about waiting in lines or waiting in traffic; we do plenty of that too. But what about those intangible things? Waiting for Mr. or Ms. Right to come along; waiting for our big break; waiting for that annoying pain to go away; waiting for things to finally go our way; waiting for that bad thing we just know is going to happen; waiting to die.

We wait. It’s part of being limited to one-way time travel. And if we counted all the moments we spent waiting for things vs. all those moments we actually spent enjoying the things we were waiting for… well, let’s just say we’d find things way out of balance. It would be even worse when we realize that usually when we come to a moment we’ve been expecting, we’re too busy waiting for the NEXT moment to even notice.

What if we lived our lives in active waiting instead of passive waiting? What if we took the time, on occasion, to sit and really WAIT – to think about the things we’re expecting and what that expectation is doing to us? Will getting married REALLY change things? Will that baby REALLY make things better between us? Will this vacation REALLY be just what I need?

I think if we all took more time to actively wait, we just might find that our expectations and the actual realities will match up more often. And in the meantime, we’ll learn to appreciate the other 98% of our lives… the time we spend waiting.