On Waiting

20 December 2020

Writing, and perhaps writing poetry in particular, is a lot like fishing. There’s a certain staging required: expansive and fertile landscape, preferably undiscovered to others. Then there is the waiting. And finally, if one is lucky, the arrival.

Neruda writes about this, how poetry “arrived in search of [him]”, and “from a street [he] was summoned…abruptly from others.” As the ultimate distillation of language, poetry has no requirement of structure, narrative arc, or character development, no requirement even to be comprehensible. Like the faithful’s claim of God speaking through them via divine tongues — poetry arrives, often without decipherable meaning, and often without permission.

This means the life of a poet is primarily spent waiting, waiting in anticipation of arrival. Days pass, then seasons. The sea flows on, commanded by no one.

As a kid growing up in suburban Connecticut, I spent many days and nights waiting like this. In a small boat unmoored on an empty lake, or sailing on the shimmering waves of the Long Island Sound. Sometimes the catch would take 2 days, and more often than not, I would return home with a sunburn and nothing else to show for it.

The poems “arrived” as well, around age 14. They were unwieldy, verbose fragments at first — that still make me cringe. But as with any craft, years of reading, imitation and practice honed the skill, at least a little further. “Sorry, I need a moment” became a refrain that my closest friends understood and tolerated, as I slipped out of classes, functions, taking a deviated turn into a quiet corner to sit with my notebook, happily held against my will.

After long periods of waiting, the writing just happened, almost like bleeding, as Hemingway famously said. It is a powerful feeling that any creative understands: the incomprehensible and overwhelming revelation of it.

I stopped writing poetry about 3 years ago. I was building a startup, and the focus and clarity required was all-consuming. My lifestyle oriented towards one self-defined goal, and could no longer simply be a series of curated moments, an indefinite stretch of waiting. I started optimizing for action and impact, versus optimizing for the waiting and blank space required for artistic creation.

I could go back to writing at any time, I told myself. It’s not so easy to ‘go back’ to the strenuous demands of building a business from scratch, deeply engaging with the technology ecosystem, or making a massive impact.

But as I look back on the past 3 years, I certainly want to infuse more waiting into my life. The best decisions of my adulthood resulted when I took significant steps back from daily life — the worst decisions, conversely, were committed while muddling the strategic and operational, the functional and the creative, and forcing action when waiting and blank space were required.

It is nearly impossible to completely compartmentalize or engineer “creative space” or waiting, but there are tactics that have helped. I try to keep all meetings to 3-4 consecutive hours of the day when possible, for ample undisturbed time for focussed / creative work in the rest of the day. I take Sundays off every week as strictly alone time (no work and no other people), in order for the week’s subconscious learnings to percolate and surface - and take Monday mornings to document those points. I try to spend one long stretch of every month in nature, an incredibly generous source of perspective, and a proven practice for improving underutilized neurological connectivity. I surround myself with people and mentors who are thinking / operating on even longer time scales than me, who are far better at exercising the immense patience of waiting. And I practice Vipassana, the ultimate antidote to the unceasing tempo of modern life.

For some time, I had lost touch with the power of waiting, but now I cherish it: its familiar unpredictability, its secret and mythic magic.

In Dreamwood, one of my favorite poems of all time, Adrienne Rich writes about her daydreams while staring at a old, scratched typing stand. In the mirage of the typewriter, she sees a map “of the last age of her life.” There is one line I will never forget: as she manifests this dreamwood, it becomes “not a map of choices, but a map of variations / on the one great choice.”

When waiting, dreaming, or writing poetry, life becomes a map that can distill to such a potent, undeniable core. And there is no clearer compass, no further frontier, than that.