Waiting is fun

I enjoy waiting. I enjoy waiting at the doctor’s office, at the dentist’s, at the hairdresser’s. I enjoy waiting in queue for my airplane to board, and I enjoy sitting in airplanes on long flights where I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I enjoy long drives across the city. I even enjoy being stuck in traffic.

I enjoy all these moments of waiting for something to happen. Yes, they rob me of my agency to do the things I want or need to do, but they are enjoyable for that very reason.

When I’m waiting for something to happen, that time is already spoken for. It’s earmarked for sitting in the doctor’s office, or in an airplane, or for the long drive to a friend’s place. I’ve scheduled nothing “productive” in that time, because it’s not possible to get anything useful done during that time. It’s dead time. It’s time where I’m not eating or sleeping or watching TV or working. Where I’m not pressured to be productive, because there’s no way to get anything useful done while I’m in a waiting room and the doctor’s assistant is interrupting me over and over again.

And so I slip into a state of simply being. Of observing the people and events around me without feeling a pressing need to do anything about them. It’s when I notice all the little things people do. It’s when I can laugh at and fall in love with our collective humanity. Sometimes I judge people—for wearing Crocs, watching reels on their phones too loudly. Sometimes I notice heartfelt moments—a kid reaching for their parent’s hand, somebody getting a glass of water for their partner, somebody else leaning their head on their parent’s shoulder. I overhear conversations and shelve them away to recount to my friends later. I notice weird labels on machinery, funny signs, wildlife, people falling asleep in chairs, spelling mistakes on forms.

But this isn’t just the time for me to observe the world passively. This is also a time to think. I often get lost in reverie while I’m at the dentist’s, thinking about somebody I love, writing projects I’m working on, programming problems I’m trying to solve. Sometimes I get so lost it takes me a few minutes to come back to reality when I’m finally called inside the doctor’s office.

This is also a time to read. It’s my second favorite things to do on flights (my favorite is sleeping). Reading is an activity that, for me, is uniquely resilient to constant interruption. I can read a few paragraphs, attend to something else, then come back and continue where I left off. I can’t do that when I’m writing code or working on a blog post. I can’t even do that when I’m playing a video game. Reading is woven so deep into my life that dipping in and out of it doesn’t take much cognitive effort, nor does it bother me that much.

In these states of waiting—I’m really trying not to use the word “liminal” in this blog post, I hate how it feels on my tongue—I often come up with new ideas, make new connections, plan for the future, solve problems that had plagued me for weeks. If I allow my brain to roll along with whatever thought flits into it, just maintaining a soft focus on it without trying to guide it into any specific direction, some strange alchemy happens. I think thoughts I’d never thought I could have thunked.

When the waiting finally ends, it feels like the end of playtime. Like my grandpa is standing in the verandah, yelling at me to come back indoors from the park because it’s 7pm. It’s time to say goodbye to all my friends, wipe the mud and grass and bugs off my clothes, wash my feet, and go back indoors. It’s time for homework, preparing for the upcoming school day, brushing my teeth, and going to bed.

All that is to say that I like being bored. I like waiting. As an adult, it’s one of the few times I allow myself to simply exist without feeling the pressure to do something “useful”.