On the courage of waiting
I have grown to appreciate the radical act of patience; to long for and wait, to preserve and protect a home for those we love.
When I once asked an old partner in the middle of an argument if they knew what it felt like to wait patiently for a loved one to return without knowing when or whether they would, they replied saying that they didn’t, because they would never wait that way. There was, in subtext, a belief that they were better for this mature, diligent impatience. I have thought about that line for years now, and have wondered why we wait for something, or someone, and whether the courage to move on has a counterpart in the courage of staying, holding on, and waiting.
Music often sings about the act of waiting in the same vein that it talks about standing in a loved one’s way, refusing to let them leave. I think of nights spent listening to O Je Mane Na Mana and Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo, or the rush of Mumford & Sons singing I Will Wait to a large concert audience as the crowd sings with them. There’s the quietness of Innum Konjum Neram where she asks him, in a place by the sea, what would happen if he were to stay for just a little more time before he leaves. They ask each other in the song, ‘What’s the hurry?’ and I’m struck by how often I wish days and nights with loved ones would last just a little longer, before everyone needed to go home.
So much of my days have been this extension, this constant waiting for a someplace, a somewhen, a someone, and most importantly, a something that needs to be done. It’s a chronic, prolonged waiting, a waiting that is at times like the story of Radical Face’s Always Gold, of two brothers — one who left home and has been away, and one who stayed at home. ‘And for you this place is shame,’ a line says, ‘and you can blame me when there’s no one left to blame. I don’t mind.’ Songs like this, or the more recent Bollywood fixation with Mohammed Rafi and Asha Bhosle’s Abhi Na Jao Chhod Kar, or even Mohabbat Karne Wali’s lines point me, as always, to the other things the make waiting what it is — that waiting requires absence, it demands that you are awake and attentive, it requires tenderness and gentleness, and mostly, it is a restlessness.
Wait is derived from the Old Northern French waitier, and is related to wake. One such meaning of its roots is ‘be watchful’ or ‘observe carefully’. To wait, then, isn’t just to be, to live or exist — waiting demands careful attention, a watchful eye that is trained to look out for something you are certain will arrive. Waiting requires hope and anticipation. Without it, what do you wait for?
A Google Search of the phrase ‘the courage of waiting’ returns results on Christian websites on the joys of waiting for God, cites Psalm 27:14 (‘Wait patiently for the Lord’) on waiting with courage. My doctoral advisor nudged me last month toward Javier Auyero’s Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina, the bureaucratic violences of the State that employs waiting as a means of punishment and deterrence. My work and doctoral research over this summer involved witnessing and talking to activists who describe the months spent in prison waiting for bail on undertrial cases, and lawyer of victims of the Delhi pogrom who visit the Delhi High Court multiple times each month, only for the cases to never be heard, be postponed once, twice, and back again.
Dipika Jain and Kavya Kartik wrote of the bureucratic violece trans people and Muslims alike face in India, as they wait through processes of authentication and documentation. Sara Ahmed in Complaint! writes similarly of the penal nature of waiting, how institutions use waiting as a means to wear complainants down, erode public memory, and relegate complaints to unseen rooms and filing cabinets.
Craig Jeffrey wrote a guest editorial for Environment and Planning that began with the sentence, “We all wait".” Engaging with the notion of ‘chronic waiting’, they echo Jean-Francois Bayart’s argument ‘that waiting has become central to subaltern experience’. They present a case for such prolonged waiting being linked to the institutionalisation of chronological time, of our measurement of our everyday lives in seconds, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, rather than seasonal rhythms. Similar research has been done on queer and lower-caste temporalities across the world, how time moves differently, is experienced and contended with differently, by communities in the margins who are often left behind, or have ‘lost time’.
Jeffrey quotes Siegfried Kracauer’s essay Those Who Wait (see page 129 here) on how urban professionals in the 1920s had a profound horror vacui (fear of empty time and space), the feeling of living in a type of void. For Kracauer, waiting was not just something that happened to you, or which led you to remain in a passive state, but rather an active event, a provocation that creates a ‘hesitant openness’ and a ‘tense preparedness for action’. I would add that the need to wait is often imposed on us. To wait by choice, to hover and stay by the door however, brings a different category of anxiety and grief. To wait is often to be prohibited movement, to be restricted from moving forth, to be constrained to one point in time.
Many presentations of the metaphorical caged bird in poetry, song, or prose are followed with an indication of the waiting associated with it. To be imprisoned, to be caged, to be contained and held, is to wait not only for freedom, but for the agent of that freedom, the one who holds the keys, who gatekeeps, who stands at the doorway.
But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again?”
― Saidiya V. Hartman
Inversely, in the poetry that seeks to delay or dismiss a future place and position of waiting, someone stands at the door (often a lover) and refuses the other’s leave. The lover is the gatekeeper, the jailer, the police, affectionately disallowing departure so that they don’t have to bear the pain of waiting for their loved one’s return home. Like my mother, father, and sister who stand waiting outside the airport every time they see me off from Chennai, looking at me and following me through the glass panes of the terminal building and anxiously staying there each time, even on the latest nights and earliest mornings, as I walk in, check-in my bag, pass security check, and call them to tell them all is well.
The act of waiting for a loved one is, to me, the foremost prayer and an act of unobserved tribute. You wait because you care, even if no one notices how difficult it is. You wait because by virtue of this waiting, you make room in your home for the awaited, give them a space to return and be safe should their travels cause fear, worry, doubt, or pain. To wait is to safeguard, to keep memory and stay rather than leave. It is often difficult. Waiting tears down our arsenal of survival, it at times stops us from noticing what is already present, what we are failing to act on, our facade of anticipation to hide our fear, our worry that nothing will come. To wait is also to be worn down, to have less of ourselves to give with each false alert when we are, for a precious moment, certain that the waiting has ended.
With all that the world is reckoning with now, all the violence and the death, waiting takes a different texture. We are reminded of the quiet, impossible courage of waiting for something that may never arrive — a chance to go back home, to see those we love once more and never let them go, to recover from heartbreaks and ailments for which recovery seems impossible, and most importantly, to wait for a chance to rest.
I have been waiting all my life for something, and this something is a fact I have not spoken about to many people, yet has occupied a singular and immense space in my heart and body, which I think of consciously and patiently, every day. I don’t know what it means to wait for something that we know, with absolute certainty, won’t come back. Perhaps it’s folly, a mistake, my tendency to romanticize the harshest of truths. Perhaps, many times, it takes courage to not wait, to allow ourselves and others the respite of speed, movement, and passing.
But what’s not romantic about even the most tragic reasons to wait? What’s not there to notice and remember, in all the times when we were placed in our own temporalities and chronologies by the sheer will of waiting? I would like to think that the choice of waiting, of holding on to our faiths, our people, our homes, and our losses, is courage in many ways. With every passing day, with every person I witness who waits and works for that which they love, I’m more convinced that this is true — that the fatigue of waiting (for a long time) is matched only by the beauty it inevitably creates.
‘The dog does this beautiful thing, it waits. It stills itself and determines that the waiting is essential.’ - Ada Limon