As a child I would wait, every other weekend, for the time when I was allowed to go home, hallucinating the moment when I could return to my mother. But, like Roland Barthes waiting for his lover, this proved 'futile, or immensely pathetic': damaging, traumatic.
'There is a scenography of waiting: I organise it, manipulate it, cut out a portion of time in which I shall mime the loss of the loved object and provoke all the effects of a minor mourning'. (R Barthes, 1990, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, London, Penguin, 37)
As an adult, this early-learned state of waiting became a space I would often inhabit: stasis, limbo. It became my chosen habit.
Marcel Proust describes habit as a 'heavy curtain' that 'conceals from us almost the whole of the universe'. Habit diminishes our senses and faculties, forcing them to lie dormant.
What I was too blind to recognise is that waiting constitutes this thing we call life. Life is the waiting game we play to distract ourselves from the reality of our mortality; that we're all going to die.
But, waiting - life - is also rich with experience. Its fabric is comprised of myriad incidents. External to the body or originating in the imagination, life is the product of one's daydreaming and reflection.
Waiting need not be synonymous with stagnation. As with boredom, it should not be sabotaged by banal, rehearsed distraction. Unobscured by that 'heavy curtain' of habit, waiting can provide the room in which one learns to see clearly; to understand what it means to be: authentically me.
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