Indie Love - On Waiting

Waiting is bitter bloody agony, what can I say. I know I still have to use my wackier titles from the initial promise of this Indie Love column but life wants I talk about this now, so if you’re itching to find out if “You may need more colour” refers to race or rainbows, well, you’ll just have to wait. ha! suffer! it’s a theme!

Here’s a waiting story from the vault of El and I’s seven years of relationship drama and mythologizing to start off with: right after we met in Toronto, though both from Montreal, we decided we wanted to go to Cuba together. It was a whole Buena Vista Social Club thing. But Toronto’s expensiveish, he was doing freelance design, I was in a play, both working retail day jobs; we weren’t saving much. To pull off the suddenly-passionate-about-it Cuba scheme we’d have to split up, go to “better” jobs several states and hours apart, and survive long distance for longer then we’d been together.

I don’t know why all of this seemed so imperative at the time, except that it felt like a mutual dare, unspoken, the ante mounting around our liking-eachother-ness to see where the other was at, how far we were going to go on this new road. The waiting was gggggggggguh hah heart stopping horrible. By the end, I think we were both twitching for confirmation that the fuzzy fragile little world we were longing for and doubting was still intact. Reality gets coloured and time stretches llloooonnngggg when you’re waiting for something that might reroute your life. Falling in love in Cuba made that particular wait well worth it, (yay, love!) but to be honest, I bet odds are a solid half of waits do not end well. Hence the anxiety.

Recently, I’ve been waiting again, this time to find out about a grant which, turns out, I’ve been wait-listed for! (A No, I suspect.) In a day and age defined by large amounts of instant gratification, we still wait, don’t doubt it, we’re just probably less good at it. We wait for love, or to find out if we’re loved by granting agencies, for audiences as Franco mentioned, or for fashion as Mitz wrote, or for ideas to form, illness to end, food to grow. Depending on what’s at stake, the pressure that builds up while you wait can make unrelated events in your life bloom out of proportion, dragging your reactions along with them. Vision bends and refracts around the point in time when the end of waiting will come, making it hard to make plans. In sum: disorienting.

But at least waiting marks us with a complex set of emotional experiences, rich for interpretation in the form of paintings, plays, pop songs or, you know, personal development.

To survive it, maybe try to enjoy the hovery quality of time before the decision comes. Be tree like, it worked for Buddha, try branching into a discovery of now, since you’re stuck here. If you’re like me and need to multi-task, try to figure out what you want, aside from what the world is going to offer you. Stick post its up around the kitchen with pros and cons, it’s festive and distracting! Try to figure out how you’ll be ok if things don’t go your way, or what your way is. Hope for the very very uber best, and lastly, might as well, try to live so you deserve it!

ps- yes to those who asked, send questions and I will answer them in a similarly roaming and inconclusive manner!