Here's One for the Impatient Folks

How boredom can help us move towards ourselves.

A female wolf spider in its burrow waiting for prey to pass. Source: Shutterstock

Every man rushes elsewhere and towards the future, since no man has reached his own self. - Michel de Montaigne

Do you experience waiting as delay or anticipation?

Christine Rosen asks this question in her book, The Extinction of Experience, and it made me think about how this shows up in my work with clients.

Are people:

• Waiting for others to grow up?

• Waiting for a symptom to go away?

• Waiting for me to tell them what to do?

Or are they able to anticipate their own setbacks and progress, to imagine what it might take to do a new thing?

Making the shift from delay to anticipation is about shifting the focus back to one’s self. You can’t make the line move any faster or compel your sister to tell that story more succinctly, but you can move towards being a person who can handle such things. You can begin to be more curious about your own capacity.

Let me give you some examples.