What Are You Waiting For?!

This episode is one I might call an extension of Episode 10 - Experience vs. Reward, reframed under something we all experience all the time: WAITING. If you are really willing to take a look, you'll likely find that you live in a near permanent state of waiting. But what is it you're really waiting for? And what is it that waiting actually says to us about our experience of this very moment?

Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello,

And welcome,

My dears,

To this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast with me,

Your host,

Tiffany Andres Myers.

We talked last week about the idea of noticing how we often do things specifically for the expectation of being rewarded for whatever we do.

In essence,

You know,

The reward being some additional thing we get at the end of accomplishing our task,

Whether it's one specific thing or some lifetime goal,

Right?

And I didn't mention this last time,

But I might actually throw in here as we begin the playfulness and the curiosity of this episode that we really do this on a super large scale.

I mean,

We've talked about this in an earlier episode as well,

But essentially I think most of us live from this idea that if I do enough,

If I attain enough success,

That at some point I'll finally get that happiness that I was promised.

At least for me,

The sense,

You know,

Of being promised the American dream,

That after a certain amount of success or doing or being really good at quote unquote life,

That eventually I would be happy,

Right?

And so this waiting room for happiness,

If you will,

Which I've actually seen as a cartoon image,

Is something that I think is a reality for a lot of us.

It's the way we live.

So this week's episode is an additional way to frame or reframe or play with this idea of being happy in the moment just because the moment is enough.

And so the mindset that I want to bring to the forefront of our awareness today is the mindset of waiting,

Of waiting for something or waiting to get somewhere or to do something.

And it's really,

Really prevalent in my life.

And I imagine it's prevalent in all of our lives as we live these fast paced experiences where we're constantly moving from one task to another.

And even if there's not something on your calendar or something on your to-do list,

We're always finding new and novel ways to spend our time or maybe I'll say kind of waste our time.

And I want to be clear here,

When I say waste our time,

What I am not saying is that when we're not productive,

We're wasting our time.

What I would define as a waste of time are the things that we put in front of ourselves to specifically distract ourselves from being present in here.

And to be honest,

My love,

Sometimes we need this.

There are days or evenings where I'm wasted at the end of the day and all I want to do is sit down with a glass of wine and some skinny pop and turn on a crime show.

And for those of you that know me,

This is pretty much my wife and I's idea of evening bliss together.

But here's where these moments can become a waste versus becoming the thing that I love so much about being married to this woman who likes wine,

Skinny pop,

And true crime just as much as I do is that when it's really meaningful,

We're still right here with each other.

Right?

And I would contrast that to I imagine the same experience that every single one of you probably has that I do to the mundane and completely disconnected scrolling through social media or any other virtual platform,

Right?

I tend to find very clearly that the moment I turn my phone off when I'm scrolling through all of those things,

There's like a weird brain space of like having to reconnect to being here,

Which is a great indication that at least for some period of time,

I absolutely wasn't.

So these are the kinds of experiences that I mean by wasting our time,

Right?

Which I think is probably completely contradictory to what many of you might feel when you hear the term waste of time.

It's like if I don't want to do it,

If it's not a self-imposed task or if it's not something that at the end of the day I can say,

Look at what I did today,

Then maybe it's a waste of time.

But for me,

Pulling a bean bag out and laying in the sun and spending 10 minutes outside getting warm and some vitamin D,

Not a waste of time.

But I imagine for many of you,

That experience might be quite challenging as feeling like a waste of time when there's so much else to be done.

So how can I relate this back to this idea of waiting or waiting for?

And what I really want to say about this experience of waiting is that we're kind of forced to experience it all the time.

I'm based out of Atlanta,

So any of you that live here with me,

You're probably incredibly familiar with the experience of waiting in your car to get from one place to another.

Atlanta has terrible traffic.

Now it's not the worst in the country,

But we rank right on up there.

So what does it feel like?

Can you actually imagine whether you're in Atlanta or not,

Putting yourself in any kind of vehicle and being stuck between where you left and where you're going to?

You don't know how long you're going to be there.

You're in traffic.

Maybe there's an accident.

Maybe there's road work.

Who knows?

But here you are.

You're at a standstill and you have somewhere to go.

Can you feel,

As I paint this picture for you,

What it actually feels like in your body to be in this space of waiting?

There's a sense of anxiousness,

Right?

There's an energy of agitation,

Of I have somewhere to go.

I think I've said that before,

Right?

And it's so kind of interesting to me when we think about this experience in relation to being in traffic because there's a sense in that moment that what I have going on is more important than what everybody else has going on.

I've even caught myself before,

You know,

Seeing a sign on the Georgia highway that says accident up ahead,

You know,

Like 15 minute delay.

And my mind's immediate response is,

Fuck,

I have somewhere to be.

And luckily,

I think I've been practicing long enough with the kind of human being that I desire to be and experience in the world and pretty quickly when that pops into my head the next thought is,

I hope that person or those people are okay.

But I bring this example up to articulate the beautiful and painful experience of waiting.

And traffic is a great example of exactly what that is.

It just carries an inherent sense of anxiousness.

And the reason I'm recording this episode in conjunction with the previous episode is essentially I think these two experiences intertwine and really intermingle well together where what we're really waiting for is the reward at the end of our action,

Right?

And for driving from point A to point B,

The reward is getting to where we're supposed to go.

The playfulness,

My loves,

About all of this is the experience of waiting for inherently means that whatever you're experiencing right now,

You're saying is not worth your time.

It's not worth your attention.

It's not where you're supposed to be.

It's not what we're supposed to be experiencing.

And inherently,

What does that mean?

It means there's a literal friction,

An uncomfortable rubbing up against of what we want life to be in that moment and what it actually is.

Now,

Maybe I can give you another playful example.

And this happened over the summer when my wife and I were rock climbing quite frequently.

And I realized one day that my wife was already at the gym and what I didn't notice was that I had this sense of anxiousness and waiting on the drive all the way to the gym.

Completely missed that one.

But as I was in the stairwell of the parking garage,

I found myself sprinting up the stairs.

And as I'm sprinting,

I'm skipping steps.

I'm losing my breath.

I'm starting to get to feel out of shape,

Right?

And I paused all of a sudden.

I'm like,

What am I doing?

Like my intention is not to be on a run or on a stair climber.

My intention is just to get to the climbing gym.

And yet here I am sprinting up these stairs.

And the distinction that I want to make you guys is that I wasn't sprinting with excitement,

Right?

I was sprinting with anxiety.

And this is going to be an entirely different episode.

I kind of am catching myself here.

I like to allude to episodes that are yet to come.

There is definitely going to be an episode about the playful curiosity of the difference and similarity between the energy of anxiousness and the energy of excitement.

So I'm just going to leave that there.

Maybe you can explore that all on your own and enjoy the exploration.

But what I want to offer with this story is I was not sprinting up those stairs with excitement.

I was sprinting up those stairs with the anxiousness of waiting to get to where I wanted to be.

And when I realized that in that moment,

I asked myself,

Is this moment of being here worth my time?

And the answer was,

Yeah,

Why not?

I mean,

I was in a gray stairwell made completely of concrete with,

You know,

Kind of nothing engaging around me.

And yet just by saying,

Yeah,

I can slow down and this is worth it.

I noticed that the concrete underneath my hand was cold and smooth.

That the soles of my feet were tingling from having sprinted as far as I did up the stairs.

That my heart was beating in my chest from being exercised.

And you guys,

It felt really good.

So by the time I got to the gym,

I was in a really great space of mental and emotional and physical well-being to have an excellent day of climbing.

But I don't know that that would have been the truth had I continued that dead sprint all the way to the gym because heaven forbid I fucking miss something.

But we're doing this all the time.

When we have something to do at work or a task to accomplish at home,

There's this real sense that actually doing it isn't worth our time and we're just doing it to be done with it.

But you guys,

How much of our life is these things?

How much time do we spend doing things because we feel like we have to do them?

Not because they're the things we're choosing to do for ourselves.

Here's the power.

This is kind of what life is made of.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't constantly question the things that we're doing and whether we actually have to be doing them.

One of the things that I love to encourage is don't fucking do anything until you're ready to do it.

Let the dishes sit in the sink until you're so annoyed by the dishes that you actually want to do them.

Now if you're married that might not go so well.

But at some point you're going to do any of these tasks that we're doing because we have to,

There will come a point where you're doing them because you just want to do them.

Like even going through your pile of stuff that should have been gone through ten years ago and you know three quarters of it needs to be given away.

Every time you walk by it you get annoyed because you're like,

Oh I need to take care of that.

But what if you removed that?

You don't need to.

You don't have to.

At some point you're going to do it just because you want to.

But here's the playfulness and the power I think in this episode about waiting is if our life is full of these tasks that just kind of have to be done and right now we are living,

I don't know,

50%,

75% of the moments of every single day of our life waiting to just be done with the things that we're doing,

How much of our life are we missing?

How much of our life are we filling with that subtle anxiety of wanting to get to where we're going instead of allowing ourselves to be where we are?

I mean,

Maybe your life this is only 30% or 40% of how you spend your time throughout your day.

What if it's only 20%?

What would it feel like for that 20 to,

I'm going to say for some of us probably like 70% of the things we do every single day we do because we have to and we just want to be done with them.

What would it feel like if we actually enjoyed every single one of those experiences?

How would our life change the radical nature of the way we feel about ourselves and our lives,

The sense of satisfaction and contentment and happiness if we stopped waiting and started living?

I hope that this playfulness and this curiosity comes to be as meaningful for you as it has been for me and I'll encourage that this experience of being human is all about remembering and forgetting.

Everything that I'm talking to you about and sharing with you here is something that I have remembered or learned and then forgotten again probably a thousand times which is why I love meditation as a practice because you sit down on your cushion,

You get lost from what you're doing and you come back to that point of attention and again we can do it a thousand times in one set and every time we do it and we don't demean ourselves for forgetting we're practicing self-love and self-compassion as well.

So my dears I encourage you to take this into your life to play with it.

Notice the moments that you're just waiting to get somewhere else and ask yourself the question what would it look like to let this moment be its own purpose to fulfill itself just by being here?

What would it look like to do this just because I want to do it not because I want to be done with it?

What would it look like to sit in traffic and turn my music on and dance like a crazy person because that moment is exactly where I want to be?

How many moments can we change ourselves out of this space of waiting,

Waiting perpetually to achieve some marker of success to be happy?

Fuck that.

Throw it out the window and find and choose your happiness right now.

With all the love I have to give thank you all so much for being here.

Until next time.