The Waiting Game

Being Patient & Present In An "On Demand" World

The Towpath, Johan Barthold Jongkind, 1864

For the majority of my life I have not been a patient person. At least as far as I can remember anyway. I imagine that my parents, straight shooters that they are, would say the same. I’d also say that equal to my impatience would be my decisiveness. I used to think the two went hand in hand, the former being the result of the latter. I’ve always had an easy time making choices and then taking action. What always gnawed at me was waiting for the results of that action. Adolescent me would have told you about the torture, the agony, of waiting a week or more for skateboarding equipment ordered online to reach my parent’s home in rural Vermont. Does anything other than furniture shipping internationally take more than week to be delivered these days?

It was early on in the pandemic lockdowns in California that I was struck by just how “on demand” life had become. After that early pause when nobody knew how Covid was going to play out, things picked back up at a rapid pace. Content to stream, food to be delivered, anything and everything to be ordered from Amazon. If Burger King drilled it into our minds that “yes, you can have it your way”, then the last five years cemented that in addition you can get whatever it is you want when you want it, even if there’s a global pandemic. As I’m sure you can imagine, this doesn’t instill the healthiest habits in someone who’s not particularly patient. Luckily for me, I met my wife in 2019 and when I proposed to her in 2021, my journey towards being not only a more patient person, but a more present person, began in earnest.

To be clear, there is no prescription in this. I’m certainly not suggesting that being in a relationship or getting married automatically makes you more patient or requires you to be more present, although that has been the case for me. It’s entirely possible that even if I was still single I’d have reached the same level of disgust with mindless consumption made possible by ubiquitous immediacy. Possible, but at the very least it would have taken longer. Even writing that is hard for me to wrap my head around because of how warped my perception of time has become. I know lots of people who feel the same way. 2018 was a few years ago, but also forever ago. Is it still 2022? We’re more than halfway through the 3rd decade of the 21st century. What?!

If getting married nudged me into practicing patience and being more present, then my wife’s pregnancy shoved me over the edge. 9 months(and then some) seems like a long time, but it’s also no time at all. At least for men anyway, ask any mother about the tail end of their pregnancy and they’d probably smack you for suggesting it all flew by. What’s more, the pregnancy time warp pales in comparison to what it’s like once the kid arrives. It’s been 3 weeks since baby C joined us and I truly cannot make sense of that, in the best possible way. Where I’ve allowed my attention to go, what I’ve had time and energy for has already fundamentally shifted and for the better I might add. I have already found a new gear of patience and a new state of presence. It hasn’t necessarily been natural, more than once I’ve had to audibly remind myself that a moment is temporary and I’ll be missing it when a different phase has begun. That’s where things get really interesting, which is my all encompassing word for the complete bundle of my emotional states.

I can’t help but look at my daughter and get excited about taking her to the ocean for the first time this summer, or her first Christmas, or her first steps, or putting her on a snowboard for the first time. It only rolls on from there, all the firsts she’ll have and routines she’ll cultivate. 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, all the sudden she’s grown and we’re old. As someone so used to living in the moment I gotta tell you, it’s a fucking trip. Had I been going through all this at a younger age I don’t know that I would have been able to embrace all this waiting. For the better part of my adult life I knew I wanted to be a dad, thankfully it didn’t happen until I was actually ready. All the waiting that I found so intolerable in my adolescence, waiting to get my driver’s license, waiting to move out west, waiting to meet the right woman, waiting to make more money, waiting to get through a pandemic, waiting to meet my daughter, it’s all led to playing the most important waiting game, which is waiting for my kid to become an adult.

In the meantime, I’ve got a business to open, vehicles and motorcycles to maintain, denim to break in, photos to take, mountains to ride, stories to write and a body to condition. All of these things require patience and presence of mind to be enjoyed fully. Fortunately for me, I’ve developed both and will continue to work on not only maintaining them, but refining them as well. In that I think there’s an opportunity to have more agency over our perception of the passage of time. If tracking how many times I wear a pair of jeans in a daily log before I wash them(it’s 15) can effectively slow the rapid march of time, then maybe tracking all sorts of other behaviors will have the same effect. Nothing like a tangible and visual reminder of how full your days, weeks and months can be to lay bare how long a year is. If you’re going to play a waiting game, the very least you can do is remember that a game should be fun, especially one where you make the rules.

That’s All Ya’ll!