Life's Lessons #1

One of the most widespread fallacies in our society is that waiting is a wholly unskilled function. A mere nuisance, like intestinal gas, that requires no more training or aptitude than breathing or defecation. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Consider the new-born infant. It wakes up. It screams. Its mother immediately feeds it or cleans its bottom or both. Waiting has no meaning for it. It is inexperienced. But not for long, because pretty soon its mother has either dropped dead from exhaustion or discovered that attention postponed for a few minutes will not prove fatal. The wise baby will learn at the same time that these solitary moments can be put to good use by eating small objects off the floor or teasing the cat. This is the first lesson in waiting: that life offers periods of uncommitted time as well as myriad resources to fill them.

A lamentable number of people do not progress beyond this. These are the children in the supermarket who trigger grapefruit avalanches, the young persons who attack mailboxes, the junior executives who pace and fret in airports, the angry citizens who enliven traffic jams through repeated and prolonged use of the automobile horn.

The second lesson, that it is a good idea to sort out those methods of passing time that will result in gastric ulceration or jail time from those with a more benign impact on later life, may be learned soon after the first or may be postponed for years, depending on the aptitude of the individual and the quality of instruction available. Most of us do achieve this level of competence eventually. We are the ones who never leave home without a pocket full of reading material or a bag of knitting or a tape player that will teach us French in our idle moments. But we need these crutches. We are fidgety without them.

It is the rare one among us who successfully completes the third lesson, that resources can be found within us to ease the passage of uncommitted time. Those who have mastered this lesson are usually old, but rare instances exist of younger adepts. These are the people you see occasionally, without books or puzzles, who are seated quietly somewhere looking through the fuss of their surroundings at some gracious and satisfying world that they have summoned out of their experience. Their faces are peaceful. They have achieved satori.