The peril of waiting rooms
I have been spending a lot of time waiting lately. Two of my loved ones are having some health issues and we have spent more hours in waiting rooms than I can begin to count. Waiting for doctors. Waiting for surgeons. Waiting for reunions in recovery rooms.
Having made quite the tour of waiting rooms, I can say that none are super comfortable or comforting. Instead, they tend to be a little chaotic, loud and crowded with other waiting people. While at one point I would have thought that the contagion of illness was the greatest risk in a waiting room, I now know the contagion of anxiety and fear is more perilous.
It is probably because I arrive in each of these waiting rooms bearing my own worries that I am so susceptible to exposure to the suffering of my fellow waiters. The end result is that, even when the appointment or procedure has gone smoothly, I arrive back at home completely exhausted and overwhelmed with so much additional anxiety that I am often unable to find the restoration of a good night’s sleep.
Waiting can be weighty
It’s not just the waiting in designated waiting rooms that weighs on me. I’ve felt uneasy as we wait for appointments and consultations. The awful time between having a lab test done and receiving its results is freighted with uncertainty. Not knowing how the next weeks and months will unfold creates more fear than anticipation.
Which is all to say that there has been a weightiness to my waiting. This weightiness is causing me more suffering than the actual situations do. This weightiness is stealing me away from what is actually happening in my life at any given moment.
Surprisingly, what is happening moment to moment is as beautiful as it is worrying. I’ve had more time with my two loved ones than I ever would have had were it not for their health issues. There is a warmth and an intimacy to being invited into someone else’s health struggle. Walking together through challenges like these deepens your connection. We’ve had great conversations. We’ve shared more laughs than tears.
There is a way to wait without so much weight
Earlier this week, a friend shared the following Bible verse at the beginning of a meeting:
For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: By waiting and by calm you shall be saved, in quiet and in trust shall be your strength. – Isaiah 30:15
Hearing my friend read these words shined a whole new light on the nature of my weighty waiting. I am not waiting in calm, quiet or trust. The prophet promises that if I find my way back to these qualities, I will find not only the strength to navigate these health journeys, but strength beyond my own – salvation, if you will.
Steady practice can build the skills needed to wait well
For more than two decades, my yoga practice has allowed patience, calmness, and quiet to take deep root within me. They are so present that even in this current storm of anxious waiting, I can feel them flickering within me. I find myself fumbling toward them – and even if I don’t get all the way there, when I get closer some of the weightiness lifts.
Which leads to another lesson – yoga has also taught me to trust the process. This is a lesson I am still learning. I continue to learn to trust my body even as everything is changing. I continue to learn to trust that even when life unfolds in a way that I would not have chosen, it will be part of my journey of becoming the person I was born to be.
Finally, yoga has taught me to notice. I notice that my mind is unhelpfully filling the “empty” waiting time with made-up scary stories about what “could” happen. I notice how much I am causing my own suffering by focusing on the waiting rather than the living I’m doing (or could be doing) while I wait. I notice when wise words shared by a friend land squarely in my heart.
Over time, practice shifts from something we do to something we are
Over time, my practice has morphed from something I do to become something I am. Therefore, now when I start to behave in ways that do not align with the ways steady practice has made me to be, I feel uncomfortable. Something deep within me (which I choose to identify as my soul) has been burnished by my practice. Its soft gleam is drawing me gently away from the weightiness of my waiting. This essential part of me somehow knows that there is another, less painful way to wait.
Surrendering to a wise and generous higher power can change the nature of how we wait
Yoga philosophy calls this other way isvara pranidhana[1] – or surrender to a higher power. Part of this surrender asks me to recognize that I do not need to try to control what is happening. In fact, when I can let go of even of my attempts at control I begin to feel at peace with life. Isaiah is also pointing to this other way. The prophet seems to be saying that the willingness to wait calmly will be my salvation; that I will find exponentially more strength in quiet and trust than in my own feeble attempts at control.
As they have done over and over again, my practice and my faith have joined forces to guide me to powerful self-awareness. Seeing the weightiness caused by my struggle against what is happening in my life and the lives of my loved ones makes me yearn to stop. It makes me yearn to accept what is happening. Something deep within me trusts that if I can do this, I will have found a way to weightlessly wait.[2]
I pray that my time spent in both real and metaphoric waiting rooms will shine a little bit of light on your own waiting – whatever it is that you’re waiting for.
[1] Isvara Pranidhana is surrendering one’s efforts to the understanding that we are part of and governed by universal consciousness [another way of describing God]. The ego likes to stay in control of our perceived world. True alignment with universal consciousness requires that we know our own unique power and importance and at the same time recognize our small role in the whole of life. (This understanding of the fifth niyama is inspired by Alan Finger’s translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.)
[2] All credit for this lovely turn of a phrase goes to my dear friend and poet, Noel.