Waiting

Waiting can be productive too, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Our friends recently told us the tragic story of their friend who passed away in a boating accident. There were three sailors on board, and the sailboat lost its keel while underway. When a boat loses its keel, it no longer has the ballast to stay upright, so it flips upside down. The friend of theirs who passed away was tethered to the boat and sadly died upon impact of the capsize. The other two sailors managed to swim out of the overturned boat, one with a manually inflating life jacket and the other with a life ring. They were not tethered to the boat—had they been, they might have been unable to escape. But they managed to get out and to find some lines to grasp so they could hang on to the overturned hull. One of the two, I think the one with the life jacket, was wearing a Personal Locator Beacon, which is a small EPIRB. This activates upon submersion, transmitting an emergency signal to passing satellites. In this story, the girlfriend of one of the men was notified immediately via text message, as was the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, who began organizing a rescue. Four hours later, the two were rescued, and the body of the sailor who had sadly died was recovered.

Over the last couple of days, I can’t seem to get the image out of my head. I picture the two surviving sailors, holding onto the hull of the overturned boat, waiting for four hours before they were rescued. I try to imagine myself in their place, knowing that my friend has died and so being struck with horrific grief, and hoping and praying that someone will come to rescue us before hypothermia sets in. They wouldn’t have known how long they would have to wait or if they would ever be found. I wonder if they were wearing watches and they looked at the time. They would have had some idea of the passage of time based on the position of the sun. But without any communication to them, they couldn’t have known how long it would take for help to arrive, if help were to ever arrive.

Waiting without a definite endpoint can feel pointless. While we wait, our brain experiences something ranging from mild frustration to disheartening loss to full-blown panic. We can pass through an entire rollercoaster of emotions while waiting. Our brain doesn’t know what else to do. It seems that, as a species, we’re not well designed for waiting. They say that polar bears in the wild can spend hours just staring at a hole in the ice waiting for the right seal to come by to catch. That is an animal who is designed for waiting. It doesn’t seem that humans were this kind of hunter, because we are terrible at waiting. It feels horrible to us.

When we are forced to wait, we fill our minds with all kinds of tasks that seem productive. We may take to some sort of physical movement, exercise, or tic, we may decide to play a game, like some sort of counting, or we may seek out any information we can get, like obsessively watching the horizon, or if we’re waiting on land, checking our phones. Rarely are these things actually useful (except maybe the watching the horizon), but they give us a sense of calm. We need to feel like we are doing something productive while we wait, so that it doesn’t all feel pointless. We can’t handle pointless.   

Waiting feels like a waste of time, but as was the case with the two sailors holding on to the overturned boat, a lot can be happening outside of our consciousness while we are waiting. Sometimes the right conditions in the outside world are aligning themselves for us. Maybe our brains need to feel lost sometimes, like we’re not getting anywhere, like we’re just waiting to be found. It’s the time and the emptiness that are important. It’s like our brain needs them to renew itself. We rarely seek out opportunities to wait, because waiting is horribly uncomfortable for us. But when we’re forced to wait, and our mind goes into a sort of delirium, then we often feel renewed once we’re found again. Maybe it’s like a plunge into an ice bath. Maybe we need to take this plunge into waiting to reset our brains. Maybe waiting can accomplish something that we can’t accomplish through our own sheer effort.

I wonder what I’m waiting on now. I feel like I’ve been lost for months, ever since we returned from our own sailing trip. The adrenaline of the chaotic days at sea has long disappeared. I am left waiting, with no endpoint in sight.