From Ugly to Awe-full

An Experiment for Waiting (Experiment #9)

Hi, lovely friends,

This weekend I’m in New York City with my family. It’s all art, Broadway musicals, and stuffing our faces with as much pizza as we can manage for the next 3 days.

It’s also quite a bit of waiting.

Waiting to board the airplane. Waiting to take off. Waiting for the drink service to start. Waiting for your turn to slink into the tiny closet they call a restroom to pee. Waiting to land. Waiting to disembark. Waiting for a cab. Waiting for the click-clack of the hotel receptionist’s computer to produce our key cards. Waiting for one of the four elevators servicing this 50-floor hotel to finally make its way to the floor we’re on to take us away. And so on.

Waiting is not easy. (As any Elephant and Piggie fans out there will attest.)

In fact, waiting can be downright ugly.

Where is that f&%* elevator? What the heck is wrong with the people who designed this system/are in charge around here? Seriously, what in the heck is going on? This is so annoying. etc.

This isn’t my loop during every waiting time, but, man, the thoughts that sometimes ricochet while I’m in waiting mode aren’t that far off from a toddler’s tantrum when he realizes the french fries he ordered are too hot to eat.

Maybe you’re the patient sort. The kind who serenely maintains a zen half-smile as she contemplates her buddha nature while standing in the elevator vestibule.

If you are, feel free to scroll on. For the rest of us, I’ve dreamed up an experiment I’m hoping can transform our waiting times. Stay with me for a minute, because we’re headed to polka-dots.

Yayoi Kusama, Love is Calling (2013). Image: M_Strasser via Flickr Creative Commons.

You see, last week my sister and I took my mom to the modern art museum to celebrate her birthday. They were exhibiting the work of Yayoi Kusama, a 94 year-old Japanese artist who paints a lot of polka dots.

When I entered the mirrored room exhibit, I was struck by nothing less than infinity. The dots went on and on, for as far as the eye could see and for as far as my imagination could stretch.

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“Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity.“ -Yayoi Kusama

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It was wonderful. It was quite literally awe-some.

In Awe: The New Science of Every Day Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, Dacher Keltner defines awe as “the emotion we experience when we encounter vastness, mysteries we don’t understand.”

In that mirrored room, as my brain stretched up and out to sense the infinite polka dots, I could feel my heart stretching open, too. My shoulders dropping, the heaviness of the day-to-day worries and irritations I tend to drag around with me falling away.

For some reason, last night, as I lay in bed wondering what could be done about the horrid, entitled monologue that can loop through my waiting times, I thought of the dots. And an experiment was born.

If you want to try it, too, here’s what to do:

In any of your in-between times where you’re waiting—standing at the elevator button, the slow-shuffling line of the coat check, the grimy subway platform awaiting the train—when you catch yourself growing impatient, annoyed, or frustrated, start by imagining the dot of your heart, pulsing softly inside the dot that is you in this world.

Next, imagine the humans nearby, also dots, in your building, on your block, in your city, which is also a dot. Then drift up to see you’re on this continent which is floating upon the dot of this world which is one of billions of dots in this galaxy, which is one dot among trillions in this universe.

Feel the awe. Sense your invisible adulting backpack of stress ease slightly as your heart expands.

Feel this in-between time, shifting. From ugly to awe-full.