“Hurry Up and Wait”: Lessons From When Life Sends You To Monopoly Jail

My life right now can best be summarized by the phrase, “Hurry up and wait.”

This is the answer I give when asked “How’s it going?” by someone I actually care to get into a real conversation with.

This is extremely hard for me. I like action and forward movement. I like measurable progress. I am okay with problems… As long as there are solutions to be found. This is not to say I don’t have patience, because I do, but here are different types of waiting. I have a great deal of patience when it comes to waiting for an investment to perform, but very little when I’m waiting around for an injury to heal or an illness to pass. I have the patience to wait for a tree I have planted to bear fruit, but waiting to begin a journey—to take action in a task—feels a lot like purgatory to me.

But, like it or not, that’s where life has me at the moment: Hurrying up and waiting.

Which feels counterintuitive to how my life appears right now: where EVERYTHING is happening all at once.

†††

First and foremost, the health struggles. As some of you know I’ve been in a mighty battle with my physical body this last year as injuries to my upper, mid, and lower extremities all finally came to a head and could no longer be ignored. I could no longer fight them all alone—I knew I was going to have to tackle them one at a time if I was ever going to make any progress. And I was going to need professional help. The shoulder diagnosis was the most known quantity with the clearest path, so we started there first. I had shoulder surgery seven weeks ago, which was simultaneously the best and worst possible time.

The Best Time: It would be in the second trimester of my wife’s pregnancy, where she would be strong enough to be able to carry the load for us during the acute recovery phase, and theoretically far enough removed from the baby’s due date that I would be mostly recovered by the time she arrived (having shoulder surgery with an infant at home would not be good).

The Worst Time: I have a dozen different irons in the fire and was really starting to get into a flow with work and writing, and I feared/knew all that momentum would come to a halt.

Which it did. The post-surgical recovery has been anything but smooth. Which in addition to being painful, plays tricks on your mind. Seven weeks removed I can still barely type this without intense pain. I do not feel like my shoulder is fixed. But I know that if I rush things—if I try to do more than I should—I’ll make the situation worse. So I have to go slow. I have to wait.

Adding to the misery is that I am not only waiting for the shoulder to heal, but I can’t begin work in earnest on rehabbing the spine and hip until it does.

The shoulder has to get better so that I can fully focus on my work—the responsibilities I have and the new ventures. The shoulder has to get better before I can start new treatments on my back. The back has to get better before I can begin to really exercise again. I have to be able to exercise again before I can fully get my life back and be the best version of myself. I can see the road—it is long and arduous yet clear—but I can’t begin in earnest until I clear this first obstacle, the shoulder. And that healing is only going to happen with one thing: TIME.

So I hurry up and wait.

The shoulder recovery is the most pressing and the most consequential, but this theme is currently manifesting itself in many other ways as well:

·      My wife is pregnant. That is nine months of the ultimate hurry up and wait.

·      We are planning to move (we’ll need more space with a new addition to the family). That is never a simple feat, but it’s even harder in LA, and especially at this exact moment time. We want to buy, but that seems less feasible each day the market continues to soar—even the rental market for SFHs is sparse and competitive. We are weighing all options and trying to remain nimble and flexible. We need to move, but we can’t force it. Hurry up and wait.

·      We need a new car. After years of driving old, non-sexy vehicles, we are finally buying a new car. We ordered one of the new Ford Broncos, which is very exciting… But because of the COVID lockdowns and the subsequent issues the launch is grossly delayed. We may not get it until next year.
(Seriously though, old cars. Aziza drives a 2007 Toyota Highlander, and I drive a beige, 2006 Honda Civic. It’s the literal opposite of a “panty dropper.” Women see it and put more clothes on. I love the Highlander (best car I’ve ever had), but now that a baby is on the way Aziza is finally putting her foot down and making us upgrade to something safer than the Honda (it’s tiny, has terrible visibility, and does zero-to-sixty in approximately thirty-four seconds). We could have afforded a new car long ago, but instead chose to spend our money on things like three-week trips to Brazil. “We can do Brazil, we can do a month in Europe, we can do Burning Man and the festies… Or we can get a new car. But we can’t do both.” That was our conversation for many years.)

I have no doubt that I will look back at the end of the year and say, “Wow, so much happened.” I expect I’ll have a new baby daughter, a new shoulder, a new car, and be living somewhere else for the first time in over seven years. I expect I will complete many of my goals. But in the meantime, life is making me wait. Making me wait, and asking me to see the value in the waiting I don’t want to do.

So what’s the lesson?

†††

“Can you then doubt that inactivity is [often] the way to defeat the enemy?”
-Quintus Fabius Maximus

I find myself thinking of Fabius during this time of impatient waiting. Fabius was a Roman aristocrat who lived during the time when the famous general Hannibal of Carthage did the impossible and crossed the French Alps with his entire army and descended into Italy to lay waste to his sworn enemy, Rome. Every battle he fought, he won. In convincing manner.

The greatest danger to Hannibal’s grand design emerged in the slow-talking, dispassionate Fabius Maximus. Fabius realized that Rome must deny the Carthaginian the battles he sought, thereby neutralizing the enemy’s obvious tactical superiority. Enough Romans agreed with Fabius following the disastrous Battle of Trasimene in 217 BC. In fact, Fabius was soon appointed dictator, a unique office enacted during emergencies that concentrated vast power in the hands of one individual for a limited term. When Fabius finally marched against Hannibal, he stalked the Carthaginian but refused to accept open battle, except [on] only the most favourable of terms. Hannibal gradually began to fear Fabius as an opponent who understood how to hurt him most: by not fighting. (https://militaryhistorynow.com/2020/01/29/the-reluctant-warrior-how-fabius-maximus-became-romes-greatest-general-by-avoiding-battle/)

Fabius knew that Hannibal was better. That he couldn’t be beaten in open combat. And so, he chose to “do nothing.” He knew he had time on his side. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t popular, but it worked. Hannibal eventually burned out. Fabius outlasted him.

I love the history of Hannibal—for its rousing story and its many lessons—and he will no doubt appear again in my future writing. However, what I am gleaning today is in the value of calculated patience. Patience when things are hard. Fabius’s waiting was not, in fact, inaction, but prudent strategy. Sometimes we have to outlast the storm.

†††

In addition to accepting that sometimes we have to “hurry up and wait,” the other determining factor is, What are we doing while we’re waiting?

This is an important distinction.

Waiting is only lost time if you spend the time waiting around. Killing time waiting for circumstances to change, instead of adapting and focusing on what you can control (trust me, I’m as guilty of this as anyone). 2020 really shined a spotlight on this, some people let themselves go and became one with their couch, others took it as a wakeup call and broke old patterns and made life altering changes.

If, like Fabius Maximus, life is going to ask me to sit still, while chaos and change whirl around me, then I am going to make it active waiting—doing what I can do in the now, while strategizing for what I will do in the future.

·      I am (again) looking inward and contemplating my strengths and weaknesses.

·      I am taking the chance to read and study.

·      I am accepting to the challenge to find a way to be productive, even through the limitations, pain, and distraction.

·      I am trying every day to practice radical gratitude and to be present.

·      I am working on my process.

This last one is the most important. The process. That is the single most important hurdle I must clear if I am going to accomplish the things I wish to accomplish and be the person I want to be. I must get far better at the process. So, what better time than when life has closed off all other pathways and given me no choice? I am building and optimizing my process to be more efficient and more intentional. To better master my usage of time.

As I said, these things are of grave importance, and are what is giving me reassurance during this strangely chaotic, yet stagnant time. It may not be noticeable on the outside, but the process itself is a form of action.

And of course, “Good things come to those who wait.”