…the passage of time can be painful…waiting for things to happen, for something to change, waiting for traction. The problem sometimes is with getting caught up in the waiting, as if things are out of our control—which of course right now they are, to some extent.
whenever I am waiting to hear back, waiting for the results, waiting for the rejection (predicting results), waiting to see if I got accepted (somewhat hopeful, somewhat confident), waiting to see if I’ll get an interview (don’t hold your breath), waiting to see if I’ll get the job offer (better take another breath), waiting to see if I can submit that piece I wrote (I guess I’ll give it a shot), waiting to see if I’ll get the artist residency (negative, one down, one more to go)…I know…all of this waiting is just the way it works, except that I want to regain control. I don’t like this business of waiting.
waiting…inhala, exhala (just sounds better in español)
you are doing something, you are not doing anything, you are making decisions, you’re avoiding being decisive—I’ll just wait a little longer, I have to think about it, I don’t know how to make the decision: time is passing…oh, jeez, what am I doing? Waiting. Again.
if you wait too long to make a decision, you might kill any energy you had left, you might poison positivity. This inaction could lead to a slow dribble of poison…from your mind to your body and back to your mind. It’s a feedback loop.
we think in terms of yesterday, today, and tomorrow…but today, the present, is constantly slipping into the past, second by second, minute by minute. Is there a future? Perhaps there’s really only a past and a present. The present grabs the moment from this idea we call future, which quickly slips into the past. Is the present and the future really just one moment?…perhaps, if we talk about the immediate future. The far away future resides in an abstract space, full of potential. But sometimes it remains just that…an idea of potential.
is the idea of the future an obsession borne out of an ideology?
‘The future’, writes [Vladimir] Nobokov, ‘is but the obsolete in reverse.’ 1 Yes! Yes? Temporal paradox?
so how long can I wait for things to change? Now, as I write—not as you read—I am invoking change, turning the waiting into doing, the unknown future into the known now, which will, in the next moment, belong to the past. Your present, when you read this, will have long been my past and I will have carved into the future yet again.
each word, each stitch, each stick, each Polaroid, each Post-it note…the moment it is brought into existence, it becomes an anecdote, a story about the past.
what will my story be? What will I leave behind? On Kawara left behind some really thoughtful things and ideas—an examination of time, and that time rooted in place, and an examination of existence.
Faith Wilding…waiting from a woman’s point of view…this may seem dated to some but relevant others…it all depends how you identify and where you are in your experience of life…waiting…a touching and powerful performance piece.
1 Brian Dillon, “Present Future,” in Time, ed. Amelia Groom (London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2013), 182.