[Originally published in my Substack: Liminade]

I’ve spent this past year in a wildly experimental mode after I got laid off from my job. I put all my things in storage and set out as a digital nomad and, a year later, I find myself a new resident of Switzerland (joining my wife here), navigating a new center of gravity. As a U.S. citizen, I am in a state of suspended anticipation alongside my brethren ahead of the November presidential election.

Welcome! This edition is a meditation on the liminal theme of: waiting.

Waiting and its dis/comforts.
Creative prompt: What are you waiting for?
3 things to read

And here’s a playlist to enhance your reading pleasure: Liminade 2: Trainspotting

1. Waiting and its dis/comforts.

Waiting.

People hate waiting.

They wait for things to start.

They wait for things to be over.

They wait to be older.

They wait for news.

They wait for results.

They wait to heal.

They wait for something or someone to arrive — or leave.

People hate waiting because it’s a loss of control, time, agency.

In user interface (UI) design, there’s something called a “latency affordance.”

It’s how you manage human discomfort and impatience with waiting.

You know what this is.

Think of those progress bars or spinning circles or percentages or sassy animations on your computer screen when you’re downloading a file, launching a video game, or updating your operating system. Think hold music for customer service calls. Think twisting endless queues and countdown clocks when standing in line at Disneyworld. Think magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms.

Latency affordances engage you or give you a sense of control to mitigate the passage of time.

Trainspotting in the 1996 movie of the same name refers to watching trains for their own sake, whether as an active hobby or — as with the film’s characters, a way to endure time as they wait for life to happen to them.

The famous monologue of the opening scene goes [in part]:

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. […] Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. [..]

Trains and their stations are about waiting — and possibilities.

They are a multiplex, a multiplier of liminal states. Places and spaces of change, transfer, connection, ephemera, waiting — an in-between of all of the things.

Train stations are all about wait management.

Stand here to wait. Go there to wait. Here’s how long you will wait. Here are all the times everyone around you will wait. Sit here while you wait. Buy this while you wait. Here is when this arrives. There is when that leaves. Then get on board and wait to arrive.

You can go anywhere, wait for the next train, or watch them all pass you by.

In the movie Sliding Doors (1998), the fate of the protagonist hinges on catching or missing a particular train and asks:

Would things be different if you caught the train, instead of missing it? How much would your life change if you were 10 minutes early?

Waiting as collective meditation.

I spent the first half of this year in Tokyo, including during cherry blossom season which had long been a dream of mine. As a photographer and train aficionada, I sought out locations where I could get interesting angles and, as you can imagine, I was far from alone in this.

There was this one spot in Nakano, a pedestrian bridge where you could get a shot of a yellow train going in and out the flowers. On this day, the sakura were just a few strong breezes from vanishing entirely, and a lot of road work cluttered the classic framing of the scene. Nevertheless, I stood on the bridge with a rotating cast of fellow photogs for a half-hour or so, waiting for the intermittent passing of the 1-in-4-trains yellow cars. My core memory of the moment is the sound of hopeful camera shutters firing in bursts every time a train was heard approaching, then a silent shared meditation as we all listened closely for the next one.

Photographers waiting for the yellow train in Nakano.

Waiting with others can comfort and pacify, or heighten both anxiety and anticipation.

Right now in the United States with the presidential election on the horizon, you can sense a powerful collective waiting ahead of November 5. We cannot make the date come faster, but we all urgently seek to fill the gap with as much certainty and agency as we can manage.

100% busyness vs. rawdogging.

Time and attention are the rarest and most expensive resources. You often hear people speak of the Attention Economy these days in real terms, e.g. dollars for “eyeballs” in online advertising and “clickbait” news headlines having outsize impact on society’s psyche.

The term rawdogging has (arguably) etymologically moved beyond its vulgar origins to mean accomplishing almost any activity accomplished without the assistance of a buffer. There’s a recent social media trend of rawdogging air travel, i.e. taking flights without the usual array of books, movies, music, or games — just staring straight ahead for the journey, or at most watching the flight tracker animation on the seat in front of you.

In our age of filling each moment with notifications and step-counters and auto-scrolling, this fetishization of… just sitting there… is no surprise. Unstructured time and mental space intersect somewhere in the current zeitgeist between endurance challenge + audacious luxury.

But it’s exactly these intersections where rest is found, ideas are born, and there is room to MOVE. To change things.

Remember those sliding puzzles, where you need an empty space in order to be able to arrange things? Your mind and your life are not so different.

2. Creative Prompt: What are you waiting for?

Grab a pen and 10 minutes for a reflective break.

Active vs. passive waiting has been a huge theme in my own life for the past year, with most major moving parts of my life reaching inflection points both within and outside my control. What holding patterns are you in?

Here’s your writing/drawing/speaking prompt:

What are you waiting for in your life right now?
When will the wait be over?
How do you feel about it? Excited? Afraid? Impatient?
If this waiting was a color, what would it be?
If this waiting was a song, what would it be?
What do you hope will be true on the other side of what you’re waiting for? Imagine an ideal day on the other side.

3. 3 things to read

Related riffs.

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, by Tom DeMarco (2002). While framed in business management terms, this is a deeply philosophical read on finding space in life to recover and invent.
Is "Rawdogging" a Flight as Awful as It Sounds?, Condé Nast Traveler 7/5/2024
Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett (1952). This is a deep cut — neither new nor feel-good — an absurdist French existential play about waiting. It’s a quick read, one I read many times and saw performed live many moons ago as a French lit student. Here’s a free PDF of it. It is a fine bitter tonic, a palate cleanser, a digestif of sorts to clear the synapses.

[LIMINADE] 2. Trainspotting. On waiting as transformation.