The Damsel's Christmas Diary Part One: The art of waiting well

Advent in a Christian sense is all about waiting. Waiting for hope. Waiting for redemption. Waiting for joy in the form of the birth of a little child who changed the world.

So often, we just want to skip the waiting and get straight to the good part. In our modern lives, we’ve done everything we possibly can to eliminate waiting. We can speak to someone anywhere in the globe at the press of a button, we can get an ever increasing array of fast food delivered to our front doorstep at breakneck speed, and a bewildering assortment of goods delivered straight to us within a day or two.

(Well, some of that depends on exactly where you live. Having moved to the remote countryside recently, I have to plan a bit more for obtaining stuff now, but it’s still generally pretty easy. I do remember when we were packing up our house in London last spring, and we ran out of packing tape towards the end of the process, despite having bought about twenty rolls of the blessed stuff. Much to my astonishment, I was able to order some to arrive at our house within about half an hour. That’ll probably be my first and last experience of that sort of ultra speedy delivery …!)

I often contemplate how waiting in the past must have been so much more excruciating, without the assistance of modern technology. Can you imagine receiving a telegram with only extremely sparse information contained within it, because of the expense of the service – and then having to wait for a long time to receive more complete news?  Or having a member of your family leave home and only receiving very intermittent, delayed news of how they were doing?  

And yet, there are still so many forms of waiting in life that we haven’t been able to eliminate. Pregnancy is probably one of the ultimate natural forms of waiting – waiting to meet your beloved child, waiting for them to develop sufficiently to emerge into the outside world. We also have no choice but to wait for wounds to heal – we can create conducive conditions for a quicker recovery, but it still takes time. And then there is waiting for news – perhaps to find out whether we got that much desired job, or maybe for medical test results which can take days or weeks to materialise. Will the news be life changing or not?

These times of waiting can be frustrating, nail biting, anxious, never-ending… I don’t know about you, but to me it can feel as if the hands of the clock just aren’t moving at all…just when I really want them to waltz around more quickly!

And then there are the more mundane forms of waiting we come up against on a daily basis. Waiting for someone to do something we need, amidst all their other demands. Physically waiting in line for something or other. And my personal favourite: those infamous telephone queues we all love to hate – always with the expectation sapping caveat that “we are currently experiencing exceptionally high call volumes”…

However advanced we become as a species, I think waiting will always be intrinsic to our lives in some form or another. And that’s probably no bad thing. Instant gratification doesn’t instil in us some of the more valuable inner gifts – patience, living with rather than fighting against uncertainty, and an ability to fully inhabit the present moment, no matter what.

Now, of course, we can choose how we wait. And I have a confession to make: for many years, I have often been very impatient, antsy and frustrated when forced to wait for something. I literally missed out on enjoying most of the summer when I was awaiting my GCSE exam results. In the end, it was a pointless waste of a summer – I did well, and it wasn’t as if my nervousness and clock-watching could have materially changed anything if I hadn’t. I also hate it when I have to wait because of some actual or perceived inefficiency in a process. (Do you know, in a parallel universe, I think I am probably a process improvement guru – it’s in my DNA!) And I visibly jig about with impatience when I have to stand in a long line, such as at the airport.

And yet, it’s begun to dawn on me in recent years that the only person suffering when I struggle with and resist waiting is me. I began to ask myself whether there was a better way…

The other day, I had to deal with a particularly piquant form of waiting. Waiting for something that really, really mattered to me. Something unique and emotional. The kind of waiting for which there is no practice, no dress rehearsal. One just has to rumble with a one-off sort of situation.

It was a tough day on one level, but I can honestly say that I’m pleased with how I lived it. I made more sensible choices than I may have selected in the past… I wanted to be true to how I was feeling, without ruminating endlessly in a way that would likely end with me spiralling into a despondent mood. I pondered about reading a book on narcissism that’s been waiting on my Kindle, but decided that might be a bit unhelpful in that particular moment. Then I alighted on my plan.

I spent the afternoon batch cooking – two types of soup and a vegetarian casserole. Not that exciting, you might observe – well, perhaps not, but it was a mentally nourishing and settling activity for a weird day when my mind could otherwise have turned endless cartwheels, injuring me in the process.

Normally, I turn some music up loud when I cook, filling the room with upbeat songs and singing along raucously while I chop, saute and stir. Today was different. I cooked in a more meditative fashion, just letting my mind get absorbed in the activity at hand so it couldn’t get up to any mischief. While some may say that cooking three dishes simultaneously was a bit over the top, it had the advantage of being sufficiently absorbing and time consuming to keep my brain occupied! I had to chop up garlic, onions, shallots, leeks, carrots, parsnips, beetroot, cherry tomatoes, sweet potato, and a butternut squash for today’s extensive cookery project! I had to keep track of three different recipes, and I took pleasure in completing everything in the most efficient way I could figure out.

I didn’t get stressed as I sometimes do when I cook. And most importantly, there was no room in my brain for any other antics – I lived contentedly in the moment, pleased to be rustling up no fewer than thirty-six separate portions of vegan goodness, enough to keep the household going for quite some time in the run-up to Christmas.

When I was finished – kitchen all tidy as if no one had been there creating mess all afternoon – I headed upstairs and journalled in mellow fashion, lighting candles and listening to gentle music.

I lived the day for its own sake, enjoying the process of creating fresh, healthy food – a task which connected me to my intrinsic humanity, my basic needs. This is not something I manage every time I face a waiting game, by any stretch of the imagination, but I do feel like I'm learning just a little more, which is satisfying...

Today for today’s work, and tomorrow for tomorrow’s work…

P.S. If you're interested in finding out about my journey to heal and reclaim joy in Christmas after longstanding emotional abuse, my book - Reclaiming Christmas - is available at Amazon in ebook, paperback and audio versions. Spoiler alert - it has a happy ending!! You can find the Amazon links here: https://www.damselnotindistress.co.uk/books.