“Write your own definition of one of the following concepts, sitting, waiting, sleeping (without using the actual word.)”
I’m going to go out on a limb and use the word, but only as a reference. I could call it “it,” all the time, but it’s in my nature to undermine rules that I think miss their creator’s point.
Waiting is a state of mind. In which a person expects the future to hold a change from the present. In which the future differs from the present. The change can be hoped for or feared. It can be a helping hand or a slap in the face. But still, when someone knows that something will happen soon enough, he (aka he or she) waits.
Waiting is powerless, without control over what comes next. A person might wait now and expect to have power later, but in the present it is the forfeit of any current power. Thus waiting is a passing off of responsibility from oneself. This can be done in the face of small matters, like waiting until the rain stops before going out to get the mail, or it can be more profound, like waiting for love.
When waiting is desirable, it is called patience. When it is undesirable, it is called procrastination, laziness, fearfulness, or daydreaming.
Waiting is a lack of action, with no lack of motion. Waiting assumes that there is an inevitable motion along time, an inescapable traveling from now to later, a pause in action so that the person is carried along a known path. If a person waits, he commits himself to a path that will not change. It is set from the begging of the waiting until the end. Other people, and the state of the world, do not change for a waiting person.
A waiting person is a rock floating in space. Its trajectory is set, so are those of the objects around it, and the future is predictable. If one of the objects happens to be a living thing, its reaction to the given rock will not change because the rock is not changing. For a waiting person, the world is stochastic; if only all the variables could be known, the one inevitable path could be seen.
This predictability can be comforting, and the inevitability of change as time passes can be frightening. Since a person cannot attend to every aspect of his life at once, he is always waiting for something. If he works for a career, he waits for love. If he pours interest into his hobby he puts off a much-needed vacation. So, we are all waiting, as we focus our limited power to control those aspects of our lives that we deem most important, or occasionally to those sides that we’ve neglected, giving them just enough attention to keep them from collapsing for another year. Meanwhile, others take this approach to many sides of our lives, waiting on all fronts for the inevitable change that we should probably know is coming. Waiting is a necessary incubation, time to let things set into motion play out as they will, until they require our attention again. Waiting is the part that gets left out of the stories, except when it is done with unusual intensity.
Or maybe waiting can only be done with intensity, but what would that make everything else?
>
...At some point, that turned from a definition into an essay. I realize it probably sounds a little hopeless. It’s been a weird day. The past two weeks have been a weird day. I’ll take that as a sign of the change that I’ve been looking for, hopefully one I’ll be happy with later.