by Stefany Anne Golberg
Meditations on waiting come in cycles. We’ve always waited—to live is to wait. It’s a devastating thought. To live is to wait.
We haven’t always known we’re waiting. For millions of years, we waited to evolve, we waited for ourselves, but we didn’t know we were waiting then. For millions of years after that, as animals, creatures of the land, we waited in the way that animals do. We waited for seasons so that we could eat, we waited for birth so that we had purpose. But still, we didn’t know that we were waiting. So we weren’t actually waiting. We were just being. And then, at some point, long ago but not so long ago that we cannot remember, we started to have consciousness, awareness. We learned that we could control the things we waited for, could plant what we most desired to eat, and so forth. And with this understanding, we stopped just being and started waiting.
The last time we really considered waiting may have been the 1950s and 1960s, when Existentialism was popular. Existentialism put thinking about waiting back on the menu, because it was primarily a philosophy that sought to understand Time and what we were supposed to do about it, this airy abstract concept that affected every little thing we did but yet had no control over.
In 1953, the world saw the first production of what is the greatest Existential work about waiting that I know—certainly the most famous—the play Waiting for Godot.