How To Sit When You're Old And Tired And Think You've Had Enough But Are Too Well-Brought Up To Say As Much

How To Sit Oblivious To An Opportunity That Might Transform Your Life, But Will Never Be Repeated

(See George Gissing or Michel Houellebecq)

The Waiting Pool

'I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-orientated culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.'
(R. Solnit, 2002, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, London: Verso, 5)

If walking is the closest one comes to doing nothing, then swimming is the physical equivalent of waiting. Dive in, hold your breath as you move silently across the bottom of the pool and, when the waiting time is over, remember to re-surface.

Waiting Room

'The setting represents the interior of a cafe; we have a rendezvous, I am waiting . . .'

Text: R. Barthes, 1990, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, New York, Penguin, 37
Photographs: Mike Berry

Watching Myself Waiting

Is Waiting A Waste of Time?

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.