{"id":8588,"date":"2024-08-29T17:55:04","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T21:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-psychology-of-waiting-and-withstanding-absence-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-08-29T17:55:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T21:55:04","slug":"the-psychology-of-waiting-and-withstanding-absence-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-psychology-of-waiting-and-withstanding-absence-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Psychology of Waiting and Withstanding Absence \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

With its fusion of frustration and hope, waiting is one of the most singularly maddening human experiences, and one of the great arts of living. To wait for something is to value it, to want it, to yearn for it, but to face its absence, its attainment forestalled by time and circumstance. All true waiting \u2014 which is different from abstinence, delayed gratification, and other forms of self-discipline \u2014 has an element of helplessness to it and is therefore training ground for mastering the vital, incredibly difficult balance of control and surrender that gives shape to our entire lives. <\/p>\n

Because, as Tom Waits so unforgettably observed, the way we do anything is the way we do everything, our style of waiting is a miniature of our style of living: There is impatient and petulant waiting; there is waiting with the humility that while we may be worthy of the object of our hope, we are not entitled to it or to the mercies of time; there is waiting with an open heart and a willingness to be surprised, for the wait itself may reveal something we did not yet know about ourselves that might change our desire for the awaited outcome. (\u201cI said to my soul, be still and wait without hope,\u201d T.S. Eliot wrote knowing this, \u201cfor hope would be hope for the wrong thing.\u201d)<\/p>\n

At its core, waiting is a frustrated relationship between desire and time \u2014 a surplus of desire with no temporal agency over its fulfillment. In that sense, it is the opposite of boredom \u2014 another singularly maddening experience<\/a>, marked by total temporal agency hollowed of desire. This is how I think of it:<\/p>\n

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But like boredom, waiting is also one of our earliest and most primal experiences \u2014 infancy and childhood are punctuated by the parent\u2019s absences and it is in missing the parent, in awaiting their return, that we get our first taste of longing, of frustration, of rage. In missing the mother, the infant is training for all the people they will ever love and miss in the course of life. Every absence is therefore a fractal of that great primal absence, and while hardly anyone can wait with a penguin\u2019s patience and faith<\/a>, those with insecure attachment \u2014 most often the product of a childhood marked by a parent\u2019s irremediable absences, physical or emotional \u2014 find waiting especially tortuous.<\/p>\n

In On Getting Better<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 one of his many small, tremendous books<\/a> about the paradoxes composing our lives \u2014 the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that we can get better at waiting, better at putting absences in the service of our emotional and spiritual development.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/a><\/em>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting the Audubon Society.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To get better at waiting and at withstanding absences, Phillips argues, is \u201cto get better at, to begin with, missing the mother, and then missing all the people one loves and needs.\u201d Drawing on the influential work of Donald Winnicott<\/a>, he writes: <\/p>\n

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The child experiences the mother\u2019s absence as a withholding of something that could be given. The mother forbears to come into presence, and the child can\u2019t help but react, respond, mobilize something in or of himself to manage the withdrawal in the first instance, often rage. Everything depends in this developmental story on how mother and child deal with the absences. It is in one sense a matter of time, of how long the wait is before the mother reappears. \u201cIt is a matter,\u201d Winnicott writes in Playing and Reality<\/em>, \u201cof days, or hours, or minutes. Before the limit is reached the mother is still alive; after this limit has been overstepped the mother is dead.\u201d That is to say it feels to the child that the mother he has in his mind has died; and\/or he has killed her in his mind out of rage at her absence. In this story it is all about what happens in the absence \u2014 what Winnicott calls the \u201cgap\u201d \u2014 and, more pragmatically, what can be done in, or with, the gap.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is in that gap that we cultivate the most essential skill for enduring absence and the tyranny of waiting \u2014 \u201cthe capacity to bear frustration without turning against one\u2019s needy self, or against the person one needs.\u201d Phillips writes:<\/p>\n

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When you are waiting for someone you are looking forward to seeing, can you do anything other than wait? And can you enjoy them when they finally arrive? How you wait is who you are, and everything depends on your sense of an ending.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At its healthiest, Phillips intimates, that sense ought to be one of open-endedness \u2014 Winnicott himself considered the mark of a healthy person the ability to have, as Phillips puts it, \u201ca certain kind of mutual relationship with another person, but to no obviously discernible, or predictable, end.\u201d And indeed the sense that we are unfinished \u2014 as individuals and as a species, in our personal development and our interpersonal relations and our evolutionary trajectory \u2014 may be the single most hopeful thing about being alive, the truest grounds for faith. <\/p>\n

Complement this fragment of On Getting Better<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 a superb read in its entirety, and a mighty antidote to the fashionable cult of self-improvement \u2014 with Phillips on knowing what you want and the courage to change your mind<\/a>, then revisit Winnicott on the qualities of a healthy mind and a healthy relationship<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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