What are you waiting for?

What's the one thing you do more than anything else in life?  Is it sleep?  Is it eating, or drinking?  Is it sex?  I would discard the things we do without thinking about them as they require little effort.  I wrote a post for a different blog many years ago that is now long gone about the breakdown of time we take in our lives to do the various tasks that make up our daily routine.  The purpose of the post was to take the time devoted to each individual task we undertake and try to isolate what I considered to be actually "living" as opposed to the myriad of maintenance needed just to stay alive. 

I thought about updating that post and recalculating the result now that I am several years older, but I've come to realise that life encompasses everything we do.  They say to live doesn't mean you're alive, intimating a philosophy that going through the motions is akin to being dead, or a zombie if you will.  The truth however is that life isn't just about big things, achievements, goals, and attaining things that make other people think our life was worth living.  You live your life in every single moment, the only thing that changes is whether or not you realise and appreciate in those moments that you are alive.

There is a deeper message here that isn't easy to uncover with words alone, but I'll do my best to try and explain it.  There can be things in life you want to do, like rising up that corporate ladder and becoming CEO.  You can do everything you can to set yourself on a path toward achieving those things, but it's rare that the goals we set in life are immediately attainable, you can't become CEO in a day, at least in most situations.  In almost everything we do there will be an element of time.  That is, the time it takes between setting the goal and achieving it, if you ever manage to do so.  When you are waiting for things to happen, going through the motions, serving your time, it's easy to focus on the thing you are waiting for, and lose sight of the fact that you are here, you are present, you have time, and you have potential to do so much more while you wait.

I wrote about anticipation, and how that can be a good thing and a bad thing.  I didn't mention the impact it can have on our thought processes though and the impact it can have on our day to day lives.  To take an example, if there's an exam, or an appointment, a doctor or a dentist or any other medical appointment, or anything else you are dreading that will happen at a date in the future which is known in advance to you, then that can impact your behaviour, and your thought processes much more than we care to admit.  If that event is 1 month from now, and it dwells on your mind, then for the next month it is conceivable that in everything you do, there will be a distraction, a loss of focus, and an emotional imbalance brought on by the worry in anticipation of that event.

Whilst these things are fixed, at a date and time known to us, we at least have the reassurance that once they come, and once they pass, they will be behind us and we can move on with our lives.  That's a luxury we don't always have.  Sometimes we are not afforded the luxury of knowing when something will happen, if it even happens at all.  Instead we live in anticipation of something that may or may not happen some day.

When the biggest part of your life is spent waiting for something, especially something that might never happen, you're left in a state of limbo.  In computing there are two terms that are used in relation to situations such as this.  The first term is known as a 'Decision Problem', this is any given problem for which there are two possible outcomes that a computer has to choose between.  The second term is an 'Undecidable Problem' that is a decision problem for which you can't write an algorithm that will always be able to give an answer to the problem. 

The best example of a decision problem is the Halting Problem, a theoretical problem for which there exists an answer, but finding it can take an immeasurable amount of time, the decision for a computer is when to stop looking, whether it finds the problem or not.  For humans when we undertake a task for which we know a solution exists, there comes a point where we stop looking if we haven't found it.  There's no easy way to explain why we stop, and as such there's no easy way to tell a computer how to decide when to stop.  Consider a locked door, and a key-ring with an infinite number of keys, you know one of those keys will open the door, so you begin trying the keys, one by one.  You will eventually stop if you don't find the right key, without trying every single key, you stop because you know you could be trying keys from here until the end of time.  Defining the point at which you stop is difficult.  We decide to stop without thinking, it's not a rational, reasonable, or logical decision.  There's no variable to measure, there's no set number we try, we just stop when we feel we should.

What all of this has to do with waiting for things that might never happen is that both represent repetition in anticipation.  You try each key going through the motions in anticipation that one will work.  You eventually stop.  When we are waiting for something that might never happen, there has to come a point where you give up waiting, or do something that removes the uncertainty.  The problem is when we wait for something that isn't the result of our own actions, something that an outside force or external factor determines, we seem to become blind to the fact we have a choice, instead we convince ourselves we don't have a choice and that we just need to wait.  Do you want to spend your life waiting for something that might never happen?  Does the certainty of the act of waiting negate the uncertainty of when or if it will ever happen?  Are we happy to wait because at least then we know what we are doing - waiting - as opposed to actually having to think about what we should do?