The Lost Art of Waiting

I have been toying with different ideas for this challenge since it was launched. But, as is my way I wanted to take a unique, Paulistic approach to it. Every time I came up with a suitable idea, I disregarded it.

Most were either already covered excellently in other entries or just didn't feel interesting enough.

I couldn't remember the name of a singer I wanted to listen to as I didn't have her saved on Spotify. I tried to think and search the catacombs of my mind to no avail. Until I put into a search: Mercury Music Prize nominee, jazz, female, album about grief, and one click and I was presented with the answer. Emma-Jean Thackray and her album Weirdo.

Awesome album, by the way. Recommend it. It's beautiful, painful and uplifting too. 

I didn't even have to open up my laptop to do that.

If I had found myself in that predicament a few decades ago, I'd have had to ask someone or look at old issues of NME, Rolling Stone, Kerrang! or maybe I'd have gone to a local music store or something. Or it would have just festered in my head and created a massive hole and given me a glorious but unnerving feeling of uncertainty for days, maybe weeks, until I naturally forgot about it.

Likewise, if I can't remember the name of a book an author wrote or who starred in what film, I would have had to look at physical literature, magazines, ask friends and family, look in the library or go into a shop.

Uncertainty. Not knowing, especially those little trivial facts, became the end of that story. Maybe you'd find out later. Maybe you'd forget. In fact, it was always the way. After thinking and searching for the answer to who that bloke was that was in that show and that film, it would dissolve from your mind until three weeks or months later you're having a shit and then think, "That's who it was."

The worrying thing is that we've not just lost that maddening but glorious sense of uncertainty that comes with life in our busy world; we've actually lost the subtle art of patience.

Think about it this way.

When I was a teenager in the 90s, I watched shows like The X-Files, ER and American Gothic, for example. Aside from the glorious double-episode weeks, that meant one episode a week for 12 to 22 weeks, depending on the show.

As a Scot, we would get most American shows second, after they had run or partially run across the pond.

Those of you born before the 2000s and old enough to remember may already see where I'm going.

Inevitably there would be the cliffhanger ending to hook you in for the next series.

That meant waiting.

So I needed to wait first for the show to be shown over here, then I had to wait a week for the next episode and then for the next season.

It sounds like a stressful situation when often a series drops a new season on a streaming platform and you can access all episodes straight away.

I know this isn't perhaps news to many people, but the wider implications are that the convenience of episodic television being subjugated by binge-marathon viewing has changed us on a deeper level.

Convenience has led to us becoming a little more, or much more, impatient.

And that change was gradual, quiet and not seen necessarily as a bad thing.

The same thing happened when it came to improvements in the agricultural sector and the availability of fresh fruit and vegetables from around the world.

In the West especially, we don't have to wait very much for things anymore.

I remember a time when I found myself wanting strawberries or watermelon in deepest darkest December. Only to have to reconcile myself to the fact that I couldn't have strawberries or watermelon because it was not strawberries or watermelon season.

Now you can mostly get anything whenever the fuck you want it.

Which is a good thing, but it has created new generations of people who expect everything straight away.

Perhaps we haven't lost patience or our ability to live with uncertainty entirely. Maybe we've simply had fewer opportunities to practise them. Modern life has quietly removed many of those little moments when we had no choice but to wait, wonder or simply not know. And while that convenience is undoubtedly a good thing in countless ways, perhaps something small but valuable has been lost alongside it: the ability to sit comfortably with patience, uncertainty and the unknown.

*

Thanks for reading!