Learning to Wait
Persephone Waits in StyleFor reasons I’ll get to, probably next week, I’ve been doing a lot of waiting, which has led me to think about the value of speculation and how speculation differs from worry.
Not all that long ago, most human societies were structured around waiting in one form or another. You didn’t have fresh peaches all year. You had to wait for peach season. You didn’t have central heat or refrigerated air, so lifestyles shifted around keeping within your personal Goldilocks’ zone.
As mass entertainment evolved, there was an element of waiting. Stories that were serialized in magazines meant readers had to wait for the next part. When radio dramas appeared, the serialized story also had a place. Soap operas grew popular by encouraging listeners to tune in the next day or next week for the new installment. Later, when movies became a thing, the weekly serial encouraged people to hurry back to next week to find out how The Masked Marvel or Trader Tom would get out of the latest peril.
And all of this, of course, led to speculation. Wondering and guessing without the need to worry.
I’m too young for the radio drama. Since I never got into soap operas, and most television available to me didn’t feature the cliffhanger ending, this wasn’t a part of my universe. (Yes. There were exceptions.) Books were one area where one needed to wait for the next book, sometimes well over a year, and speculating about what would happen next occupied many a conversation.
In these days of binge watching, of spoiler-filled sites and chat, overnight delivery, streaming downloads and all the other ways waiting time has been reduced, has the pleasure of speculation vanished?
I’d like to hope not. I’d like to think that the joy of savoring is still there, in different forms, even if the intensity often has dropped to weeks, rather than years. Still, I think that there’s a danger to expecting instant or near instant gratification, and that maybe it can have a negative impact on creativity.
What do you think?
