“It’s strange, but we’re always waiting for life to begin.” Lionel Shriver wrote it in The Post-Birthday World, and it sounds like something we think every day.
We are constantly waiting for a turning point to arrive, for that sudden moment when everything finally makes sense. What moment are we waiting for? To finish university, to land a new job, to start a new relationship, for the weekend to come, for those long-awaited holidays to finally begin?
The problem with all these questions is that, in the meantime, while we wait for something to happen, life slips by in draft form.
We live as if there were a rehearsal before real life begins; always waiting for when we’ll have more time, when we get older, when we find a partner, when everything finally falls into place. But nothing ever truly falls into place.
Today, everything begins on Monday, pleading for this week to be better than the last, praying to feel fulfilled later; maybe when we wake up tomorrow, everything will be different. Maybe when I get married, when I have children, when I become a millionaire, when… Each year feels like a rehearsal for the next one, the real one.
I don’t know an exact term for this condition; still, we might call this discomfort of postponement existential deferral, marked by living at a distance, by postponing the experience of the now in exchange for a promise of fulfillment that will arrive as soon as something happens.
I have no intention of claiming authorship over this concept. Hundreds before me have named it in their own way. Shriver herself, in the novel already mentioned; Cortázar; Silvio Rodríguez; and various existentialist philosophers have all encountered this feeling.
Cortázar wrote that we were walking without looking for each other, yet knowing we were walking in order to meet, suggesting that we long for a nearly esoteric moment to take place. His characters, like us, wander through the city searching for a secret entrance to the true instant. But the instant, in real life, slips away amid long waits, anxiety, and exhaustion; life begins and ends without us quite seeing it.
And then Silvio Rodríguez sings: I wish something would happen and suddenly erase you. It isn’t only a romantic plea; it’s also the desire for something to shake us out of our stupor, for that long-awaited event that finally activates life. But nothing ever fully erases us, or starts us over. We wait for the event that will redeem us from the present, while the present passes without redemption. Perhaps life doesn’t need anything to happen, and the most radical gesture is to stop waiting for the miracle and simply learn to inhabit it.
In Mexico City, this waiting has its own landscape: traffic that never stops, projects that promise academic and professional success, rents that rise from one day to the next, dreams gathering dust as they wait for someone to restore them.
You walk down the street, talk to colleagues and friends, and see the same expression everywhere: that of someone who hasn’t quite started living yet but is already exhausted, pleading for something to begin, or at the very least, for something to end. Drivers running red lights, pedestrians pushing past one another, all stalked by physical and emotional tensions, chasing illusory goals.
Saint-Exupéry already said it in The little prince:
—They’re in a great hurry, said the little prince. What are they looking for?
—Even the locomotive driver doesn’t know, said the signalman.
And so we live, as if we were all stuck in the antechamber of the world, warming up the locomotive before departure.
To the pathology we’ve just named, I propose an immediate remedy, an honest way out: to assume that this, with its noise, its haste, its disorder, already is life. That there is no second chance at being here. That life doesn’t begin after work, or after success, or after vacations; it is happening while we wait for it to begin.
The mistake is assuming that life has a starting point. So perhaps the most sensible thing is to stop waiting for it to begin and, with whatever there is, live it. With the rush, the debts, the noise of the microbus, divorced, childless, without cigarettes, holding a lukewarm cup of coffee.
Life is not on pause. Nor is it about to begin.
Photography by Diego Sebastián.
I'm a lawyer by sheer bad luck. The law puts food on my table, though sometimes I suspect it also gives me gastritis.