Waiting is (not) “Ew!”

The number of books I finish per year is embarrassingly low. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of books, but I don’t sit down to read them as often as I probably should. I don’t like this about myself, but alas change happens slowly.

The story arch of a good book unfolds at a similar pace to real life––very slowly. You get to the end and you can see how the plot-line was there all along. But in the best books it’s almost impossible to see how the story will end––or how a character will get to the end––when you’re in the middle of it.

I really do appreciate a good book (I can’t force myself to read a bad one) but every other page I stop, close the book, see how far my bookmark has progressed, or stop to mentally pat myself on the back for actually reading.

I guess this is my confession that I’m very impatient.

I’m in between two more “exciting” seasons of life right now: school in Boston and school in Madrid. And so there has been the temptation to take it easy (make money, yes) but mostly sit around waiting for my real life to begin. That idea didn’t settle well with me this year, though.

Sometimes I feel like I’m Marlin and life is the EAC; it’s a real struggle to just grab shell and ride it.

In Finding Nemo, the East Australian Current is this gnarly current that takes the characters from one point to another. The turtles understand that they’re made to ride it––even little Squirt. It’s their lifestyle, but it’s not yet Marlin’s, so he won’t trust them to take him through it until he’s come out the other side alive.

He calls the current “the swirly vortex of death” at first, even though he just survived a shark attack, bombs, and a field of jellyfish. Marlin essentially has no chill; anything and everything could go wrong. And he’s right. But the moral of Finding Nemo (and Finding Dory, too––sorry) is that Marlin sucks. He lives the same story as his fellow characters but he has less fun doing it.

Marlin’s problem is he wants to know exactly what he’s getting into and exactly what the risk will be and exactly what the damage to his well-being will be when he’s through, but life doesn’t work like that.

While I feel that Crush is my spirit animal in some way, I’m a lot more like Marlin. I want to know exactly where I am in the story and exactly what the end result will be and exactly how many steps there are to get there and even exactly what those steps are. When I can’t see these things sometimes I feel stuck; I won’t move or I won’t make a decision because I don’t know what will happen.

I think that there are times when we can see our plot-line a lot more clearly than others, but the times when it’s more muddled are when we feel like we are having to do a lot of waiting. And we get anxious and impatient because it’s scary.

Right now I feel like I’m doing a lot of waiting. For example, I want to make amazing things some day. But it has taken me all year to save up for a camera that can take video and for the Adobe Creative Cloud, and now I’m saving up for a new lens. (A fun bump in that journey was that it took about half of the summer longer than I had planned to find a job.) I also want to be a 100% independent, kick-butt, emotionally healthy, at-peace, loving, successful, real-life adult. But I have to become that somehow.

And there are countless things to wait for: confirmation emails, a Spanish visa appointment availability, an exciting trip, turning 21 (tomorrow, woop), graduating, food.

Whenever someone older and wiser tells me to wait, I usually smile and say something like, “Oh, totally. You’re so right. Thanks!” But honestly this is how I feel:

But waiting doesn’t have to be ew.

Waiting can be so beautiful sometimes. Because I don’t think real-life waiting is like sitting-in-traffic waiting; you’re not just stuck, with a clear view of your future route that you would be traveling a lot faster if people stopped moving to Portland. I think it’s more like taking an unplanned detour (my version of getting lost) and finding your new favorite restaurant, or breaking down on the side of the road with the most breathtaking views of Hood, St. Helens, all the mountains.

And so I think waiting can be good because there’s a need for creativity and a sense of humor. And there’s room for learning patience––which is simultaneously the worst and the best thing ever.

Here’s some good from my little taste of waiting:

Learning––from situations I never intended to be in.

Time to be okay with myself as just a person and not a person + [insert cool and meaningful thing] or a person + [insert life goal].

And most importantly time to look up and pay attention to where people around me are going and even jog alongside them for a little while (for encouragement, or even to be used as a sherpa sometimes).

But here are the temptations:

To get fed up and take a short-cut straight into a blackberry bush, or straight off a cliff.

To look at what other people are doing and think “I’m stuck; I’ll never get there,” and give up completely.

Or to use the time to think of all the things that could go wrong right where you are instead of using the time to catch your breath and get ready for when you do start moving again.

Goals and dreams work like this too. You have to do little things to make them grow, and sometimes you have to punch through a freaking wall, but you have to keep doing things––to keep them alive. And you also have to wait.

Striking a balance between dreaming and just dreaming can be tough. I’m talking about the difference between the ideas that take courage to bring to reality––these are necessary and beautiful––and the daydreams that only get in the way of real life.

A good portion of my thoughts are devoted to ridiculous ideas, and they fall into one of three categories: dumb ones that should never ever be taken seriously, dreams for my future, and wild brainstorms that eventually––when talked over with others––turn into something good and worth doing.

What “growing up” for me so far has looked like is figuring out the difference between these three types. And once I realize which ones are worth grabbing hold of, taking the first steps to let them become real.

But what do you do when there aren’t any more steps to take––at least for right now––whether you’ve been walking toward the end goal for a very long time or you just started, and all of a sudden the path cuts off but you know you’re not there yet?

You take a nap. Or read a book to learn some things. Or maybe even stop to deal with the injuries you’ve inevitably accumulated along the way. Ask for help. And see if anyone around you has been asking for help, too.

The crazy thing about reading a book is you have to keep turning the pages to get to the end. You can hope you’ll find out the ending soon, but you’ll only find out when you physically get there yourself (unless you’re the loser who cheats and reads the last page first, but you don’t count).