Waiting Is a Revelation
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Blaise Pascal
18 min read
The article extensively discusses Pascal's philosophical insights about humanity's inability to sit quietly, his concept of diversions, and his analysis of the human condition from the Pensées. Understanding Pascal's full biography and philosophical system would enrich comprehension of these ideas.
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Henri Bergson
19 min read
The article references Bergson's philosophical account of time as duration and his exploration of waiting. Bergson's influential theory of durée (lived time vs. clock time) is central to understanding the phenomenology of waiting discussed in the piece.
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Advent
13 min read
The article uses Advent as a framing device for discussing the practice of waiting, describing it as a liturgical season of patient longing and anticipation. Understanding the history and theological significance of Advent provides essential context for the essay's exploration of meaningful waiting.
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture and the moral life. And happy New Year. This installment took shape in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, each associated with waiting, although the seconds we count down to midnight are rather different from the days some of us might count down to Christmas. In any case, this piece is about waiting. It is an attempt to reframe waiting as something other than tedious and wasteful, indeed, as something potentially life-giving. As always, I hope these reflections are valuable to you. Thank you for reading. And may this new year, inevitably laden with its frustrations and sorrows, also bring you joy and peace.
“Waiting is not a passage of time to be traversed but a condition of our being … an opportunity to encounter those aspects of life deeply, perhaps neurotically, hidden in our busyness. In waiting, in listening to the inward melody of duration, we become attuned to our being.”
— Harold Schweizer, “On Waiting”
I’m writing a couple of days after Christmas, and thus on the other side of the season of Advent. For those unfamiliar with the rhythms of the Christian liturgical calendar, Advent spans the four Sundays leading up to Christmas Day. Chiefly, it is a season of waiting, recalling and re-enacting an ancient anticipation of a long-expected Savior. The affective register of the season is characterized by patient longing, sober reflection, and resilient hope. Today, of course, this ancient tradition competes and mostly loses out to an alternative liturgical season that tends to be marked freneticism, exhaustion, and, too often, emptiness.1 Yet despite this, the spirit of ardent and even enchanted expectation seems to linger in the childhood experience of Christmas, even when it is observed in strictly secular contexts.2
Maybe it is because my own children have been especially eager for the arrival of Christmas this year. Maybe it’s because I recently learned that Amazon announced it would be piloting 30-minute deliveries in Philadelphia and Seattle, and I’m old enough to remember when the standard window for delivery of goods ordered by mail was six to eight weeks, which was occasionally long enough to forget that had you ordered anything at all! Whatever the case, I’ve been thinking about that practice of waiting and how unusual periods of sustained waiting have become.
There’s no particular virtue in waiting ...
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