080392
Parentheses - An interruption of continuity; an interval.
"This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for — the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing" (Margaret Atwood).
“For every period of time when you exist, short or long, there is a temporal part of you that exists only then. And for any temporal parts of any objects whatsoever, there is a larger object made up of just those parts.” - John Locke
"Every time I enunciate 'I', even in my thought, an identity is assumed, and this identity is itself not simple, but a figure of a complex gathering of personal and impersonal histories, texts, discourses, beliefs, cultural assumptions, and ideological interpellations...it is not an artifact but a process." - Richard Dyer
Monday, July 12, 2010
"When love is a gift and not a demand, then hope will not easily give way to despair." - Lewis Smedes
while sitting in the toilet i thought i might deconstruct the experience of waiting. what is it about waiting that agonizes us? what can be done to alleviate the pain of waiting? how do you make waiting pleasurable?
well, in order to know the answers to these qns, it is necessary to understand the nature of waiting (DAMN i sound naggy, pardon me). i figured that waiting necessarily entails 4 elements: anticipation, suspense, distraction and frustration. just use the scenario of waiting for a bus as an example. anticipation occurs because you dont know which moment the bus will arrive - you look anxiously in the distance in hope of its coming. suspense occurs because you know any moment the bus can arrive - you think, "if only i knew what time it was coming..." because then you wouldnt have to anticipate every moment. distraction happens because - what do you do while waiting? however distraction is dangerous because if you get distracted (eg playing games on your ipod while waiting for bus) you can miss the thing/event/person (eg bus) that you were originally waiting for. then there is frustration, which occurs when the wait gets too unbearable and hope dissipates.
therefore i think that the way to deal with the experience of waiting is to trust (anticipation), hope (suspense), keep a close watch (distraction), and always persevere in optimism & open-mindedness (frustration). trust, because if you do not know which moment it may occur, it is easy to give in to despair and lose hope in the process of waiting - in other words, trust in the event to occur can soothe the pain of anticipation. hope, because if you know that it will occur any moment, you need to keep believing that it will occur in the next moment - in other words, the certainty of hope dispels the uncertainty of suspense. keeping a close watch on the event (the signs leading it to occur) erases the possibility of missing it altogether - which will definitely cause more frustration. persevering in optimism & open-mindedness is then necessary to deal with frustration as frustration/despair only occurs when "we set our deadlines too close or define our goals too narrowly" -Smedes. thus if we endlessly hope, we can endlessly wait, and this endless wait is not meaningless as long as you expand your definition of what you have achieved (eg you were waiting for a bus, but when the bus takes too long, instead of getting frustrated, you appreciate what you have achieved through the process of waiting, instead of defining your achievement narrowly as "getting on the bus" which would have otherwise caused you much frustration).
then, to wait is also to be patient, and to be patient is otherwise phrased as to be long-suffering. "and because much of human life entails suffering, the ability to suffer long must be a prized one" -Smedes. the ability to suffer long is therefore to hope and trust. hope finds its function when we believe that there will be a situation better than the current, while trust means to believe that something will happen because it has previously proven to be so. but this is based on the assumption that the event will occur in the first place, and this belief is only possible with faith. but faith, on the other hand, is the belief that something will happen even though it has never been proven to be so. rather, it is based on a set of values, ideology or doctrine. i guess when hope and trust runs out - when there is no reason to hope & trust anymore - faith takes over and gives renewed hope & trust.
sorry for quoting Smedes so much, but he has englightened me about many things - i just hope i quoted his ideas accurately. the rest are entirely my own ideas sprouted from 5minutes on the toiletbowl, so its no wonder if you find them crappy.
i hope this is helpful for people who are dealing with the agony of waiting. I FEEL YOU.
but even so, whether to wait or not is an entirely different question. a very good question in fact.
1 Corinthians 13 - The Excellence of Love: Love is patient, love is kind... bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things... And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
while sitting in the toilet i thought i might deconstruct the experience of waiting. what is it about waiting that agonizes us? what can be done to alleviate the pain of waiting? how do you make waiting pleasurable?
well, in order to know the answers to these qns, it is necessary to understand the nature of waiting (DAMN i sound naggy, pardon me). i figured that waiting necessarily entails 4 elements: anticipation, suspense, distraction and frustration. just use the scenario of waiting for a bus as an example. anticipation occurs because you dont know which moment the bus will arrive - you look anxiously in the distance in hope of its coming. suspense occurs because you know any moment the bus can arrive - you think, "if only i knew what time it was coming..." because then you wouldnt have to anticipate every moment. distraction happens because - what do you do while waiting? however distraction is dangerous because if you get distracted (eg playing games on your ipod while waiting for bus) you can miss the thing/event/person (eg bus) that you were originally waiting for. then there is frustration, which occurs when the wait gets too unbearable and hope dissipates.
therefore i think that the way to deal with the experience of waiting is to trust (anticipation), hope (suspense), keep a close watch (distraction), and always persevere in optimism & open-mindedness (frustration). trust, because if you do not know which moment it may occur, it is easy to give in to despair and lose hope in the process of waiting - in other words, trust in the event to occur can soothe the pain of anticipation. hope, because if you know that it will occur any moment, you need to keep believing that it will occur in the next moment - in other words, the certainty of hope dispels the uncertainty of suspense. keeping a close watch on the event (the signs leading it to occur) erases the possibility of missing it altogether - which will definitely cause more frustration. persevering in optimism & open-mindedness is then necessary to deal with frustration as frustration/despair only occurs when "we set our deadlines too close or define our goals too narrowly" -Smedes. thus if we endlessly hope, we can endlessly wait, and this endless wait is not meaningless as long as you expand your definition of what you have achieved (eg you were waiting for a bus, but when the bus takes too long, instead of getting frustrated, you appreciate what you have achieved through the process of waiting, instead of defining your achievement narrowly as "getting on the bus" which would have otherwise caused you much frustration).
then, to wait is also to be patient, and to be patient is otherwise phrased as to be long-suffering. "and because much of human life entails suffering, the ability to suffer long must be a prized one" -Smedes. the ability to suffer long is therefore to hope and trust. hope finds its function when we believe that there will be a situation better than the current, while trust means to believe that something will happen because it has previously proven to be so. but this is based on the assumption that the event will occur in the first place, and this belief is only possible with faith. but faith, on the other hand, is the belief that something will happen even though it has never been proven to be so. rather, it is based on a set of values, ideology or doctrine. i guess when hope and trust runs out - when there is no reason to hope & trust anymore - faith takes over and gives renewed hope & trust.
sorry for quoting Smedes so much, but he has englightened me about many things - i just hope i quoted his ideas accurately. the rest are entirely my own ideas sprouted from 5minutes on the toiletbowl, so its no wonder if you find them crappy.
i hope this is helpful for people who are dealing with the agony of waiting. I FEEL YOU.
but even so, whether to wait or not is an entirely different question. a very good question in fact.
1 Corinthians 13 - The Excellence of Love: Love is patient, love is kind... bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things... And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Labels: overcome