The Guardian view on advent: what are we waiting for?
With advent, we have entered a period of codified waiting. For Christians this means liturgical offices and music, the lighting of candles and, in the Orthodox church, a 40-day fast, in expectation of both Christmas and the second coming. For unbelievers, and those for whom the festival is all about feasting and presents, it often means advent calendars (though the more expensive of these undermine the ritual of counting down to excess by commodifying the waiting). Both overlay and co-opt much older rituals, the last hurrah before the lean months of deep winter, and the countdown to the solstice – peak darkness, and the promise of light.
In these high-capitalist days we tend to treat waiting as an affliction that must be abolished, and amply reward companies that aim to annihilate it. One of the shocks of the pandemic has been that while on the one hand we are one-click ordering more than ever before, we have been forced to learn to wait. Some of these waits (for shops to reopen, to be allowed to swim), while aggravating, are eminently manageable, partly because it turns out that they are not for necessities, and in part because they have a clear end. Other waits – for illumination about what exactly this virus does, for the chance to see loved ones, for an end to long Covid, have been far harder to manage, for the scale of their ramifications, and because there is no obvious terminus.
Waiting is difficult. Sometimes, it can seem to negate what is happening at the moment: it is all too easy to dress it up as virtue (“good things come to those who wait”), or the looked-for endpoint to hollow out the present. It can be a tragedy – Edith Wharton once compared the well-bred woman’s life to “a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes … the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits … and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.” For someone like Samuel Beckett, waiting was all there was; it was the whole point, a proof of and at the same time a distraction from total pointlessness.
It can also be an opportunity. For perhaps that’s one of the things we’ve learned – that, for all its deep stresses and griefs, a forced indeterminacy can focus the mind on the present, and the quality of that present. That it is necessary to celebrate now (go for a walk, watch the flowers grow, call a friend) rather than waiting for an uncertain future, and the chimera of normality. So, yes, good things come to those who wait – but only if we treat the cliche as a promise about process rather than outcome, and remind ourselves, as Emily Dickinson once put it, of “how we sang / To keep the dark away.”