Waiting
I heard it and I knew it. It’s that sound you don’t want to hear when you’re cycling. A few seconds later I was standing next to my bike: a blowout. It was raining hard. I laid my bicycle on the ground, opened my waterproof bag, found a pump after taking out some of my clothes and gave it a shot. After a few pumps I realized this wasn’t going to work.
I considered repairing it, but given the weather conditions, and the fact that I had only patched a flat tire once before, I quickly decided to call a helpline. I found shelter close to the entrance of a hospital and waited 45 minutes before my love picked me up. The battery of my old iPhone 12 mini—best-sized phone ever—almost ran out of juice and therefore I waited, I really waited like I hadn’t waited in a long time.
And I liked the wait. I just stood there in my cycling outfit—shorts, shirt, glasses, helmet, rain jacket—holding my bike upright (no kickstand) as I looked around, nodded to occasional passersby with a smile and waited, I just waited.
Just a few weeks earlier I had read a book about waiting by Dirk De Wachter. According to De Wachter, there are two types of people who wait: the watchful and the expectant. (In Dutch: wachters en wachtenden.)
The watchful are passive, in a good way. They wait without having a specific goal. Instead, they embrace the moment of stillness. They wait with an open mind, with attention and without expectation. They focus on “being.”
The expectant are actively waiting, looking forward to something and desiring that moment. They look for ways to distract themselves to pass the time.
Although I was expecting my ride back home, in that moment I felt more watchful: I was present in the waiting, not caring how long the wait would take.
Heidegger makes a similar distinction—Erwarten, expecting something, versus Warten, waiting pure and simple—and calls the deepest form of waiting Gelassenheit: a waiting that is neither active nor passive, a letting-be. I felt an inner calm, accepting the situation as it was. I left time as time and didn’t treat it as a void to be filled.
From a Stoic perspective I could have approached the situation as an obstacle to be turned into something meaningful—amor fati, as Nietzsche would put it—but it didn’t feel like that. No, it really felt more meditative.
Despite my rain jacket, I cooled down quite a bit. I only really noticed this when I was welcomed by the warmth of the car. And although I enjoyed the wait, I felt grateful for the warm ride home.