等一下: The Art of Waiting

If patience is a virtue as they say, than it would seem that waiting can serve as an exercise in virtue.  And if it were not too much to assume, I may dare to say that some of you may have been waiting for my first actual post.  I’m rather new to the whole blogging thing, so I hope that you don’t mind if I ease my way into it.  To be truthful, I rewrote this first post half a dozen times before finally getting around to saying what I wanted to.  Hence the delay.  This first post actually just covers my pre-departure thoughts and time spent at airports en route to Taiwan—with a focus on the theme of waiting.    But I’ll soon post again about moving in and everything that goes along with that.  So for now, we wait and think on waiting.

Waiting is a curious thing, in part because we spend so much time doing it for as little as we tend to enjoy it.  In mainland China, Singapore, and other densely-populated Asian locales, waiting (if anything) is a more frequent undertaking.  I suppose Taiwan may be this way too.  In the Mandarin-speaking world, shopkeepers, ticket punchers, waitresses, and others typically solicit your patient waiting with the ubiquitous phrase deng yi xia (等一下).  Deng yi xia literally means ‘wait a moment’, but is similar in usage to ‘just a second’ or any number of similar phrases.  Said testily, I suppose it could be translated as ‘hold your horses’. 

But I haven’t been doing much ‘deng yi xia’-ing yet.  Just waiting.  Because dengzhe (Mandarin for waiting) is an activity for mainland China or Taiwan.  In the U.S. it’s just ordinary waiting.  And waiting doesn’t have the exotic flair of ‘deng yi xia’.  Turns out it can even be dull. 

You see, this upcoming year in Kaohsiung, Taiwan has been a long time coming for me.  I began the Fulbright application back in September 2011, hoping that it might work out, but trying to temper that hope with realism.  But I applied nevertheless.  And then I waited.  Thanksgiving came and went.  As did Christmas.  Then I finished my last class at Calvin in January.  Not until later that month did I find out whether I’d made the first cut, which I thankfully did.  Then came more waiting.  An odd sort of waiting, because it wasn’t just waiting for my birthday or Christmas like when I was a kid.  It felt heavier, with a strong measure of self-doubt.  Because it seems that landing a job is deemed life’s proverbial next step after college.  And I suppose I wanted that in an instinctual panicky way akin to self-preservation.    

So I waited some more.  When March rolled around, I finally heard that I had been accepted as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Taiwan, where I would work in concert with local Taiwanese English teachers.  In the flurry of paperwork and bureaucratic hurdles that followed, I temporarily forgot my waiting at least in part.  But those pesky yearnings—both hopes and fears—crept quietly back in the weeks leading up to my departure, until they felt as dense as the t-shirts wadded up in the bottom of my suitcase. 

Yet a funny thing happened.  It didn’t feel like I’d actually be going.  It seemed more like a story happening to someone I’d known back in grade school but fallen out of contact with.  Even after leaving on the first plane on Monday evening, I felt like I was taking a week-long trip or some other short-term commitment. 

Waiting is a curious enterprise—it has odd effects on our perception of time.  Particularly after 26 hours spent with my high-flying friends at Delta and China airlines.  Grand Rapids to Minneapolis.  Wait.  Minneapolis to LA.  Wait.  LA to Taipei.  Wait.  Taipei to Kaohsiung.  Phew.  When the dust cleared, July 30 had turned into August 1 (the day of my arrival in Kaohsiung), leaving July 31 forgotten in a haze of bustling terminals and half-remembered airline food.  I think there was an omelet, but I cannot recall…

Part of waiting’s curious nature, I think, is the conflicting effects it has on time.  On the one hand, waiting seems to prolong time, causing it to unfold tentatively like a faded, slightly frayed fabric.  Or in more poetic terms: time spent waiting tends to drag its butt across the carpet like an old, worm-ridden dog.  Yes, time spent longingly looking ahead to the future with a kernel of present discontent embedded in our hearts is a sure way to make time drag.  Sometimes (too often) I have forgotten to use the waiting time I am given in wise reflection and preparation, because I’ve been too mindful and resentful of a perceived vacancy in my life that I wrongly think should be filled with something that hasn’t happened to me yet. 

In such moments, awareness of life’s monotonous aspects is heightened, and routines can come across as stultifying rather than comforting.  Each day seems the same, and that realization can spur frustration and/or resentment.  Oddly, I think, this perception of monotony can create the impression that time compresses itself into a string of similarly unmemorable days.  I don’t mean to imply that the days themselves are not worth remembering, but only that looking ahead to life’s next step can tempt us to put life on cruise control and forget to enjoy the ride.  And when our world blurs together in an overriding race toward some (at least ostensibly) defining moment, something of ourselves and our lives gets lost in translation.  I am as guilty as anyone, but I hope to live a bit more intentionally and present-mindedly in the coming year, a goal that keeping this blog hopefully will help bring to fruition.  So here’s to a year of reflecting, remembering, and not forgetting.  If we can manage that, I trust that this upcoming year will be well worth the wait.  I am looking forward to sharing all the experiences of this next year with you, along with all the twists and turns that they will hold, both expected and unexpected.