Holding Pattern: A Reading List on Waiting . . .
April 14, 2026 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
There is a dangerous place behind barbed wire and guns, the site of some ancient cataclysm, where the normal laws of spacetime no longer hold. This is the Zone. At its heart lies the Room, said to grant the deepest desires of all who enter. The Stalker, a guide, leads the Writer and the Professor through this post-apocalyptic wasteland.
During a quiet afternoon in the mountains a long time ago, I lay on the cold floor with my laptop watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker. I followed their journey—not of the hero, but of those left behind when all the heroes are dead—through the mired shallows. Nature, here, was the bleak subversion of itself, its power beyond measure. A strange thing happened—a trance came over me. I slid further down. Time dilated. Inside and outside melted and flowed together. And in the slow drift of the scene, in its oblique movements and interstices, in its floating, totemic debris that were now my own, liminal things became known. In waiting without end, I had entered the Zone.
Everyone waits. Waiting for life to seed, to grow, to flow. Waiting for others. Waiting for the boat, the train, the plane. Waiting for bread. Waiting for space, for time, for words. Waiting for the right thing. Waiting for knowledge, for justice, for change. Waiting for a chance. Waiting for love, for grace, for God. Waiting for freedom. Waiting for sleep. Waiting for the end.
Welcome to the essential human condition of being un/tethered in time. Thank you for waiting.
How to Wait Well (Jason Farman, Psyche, September 2020)
PLEASE HOLD
Such a cute word, queue, u and e and u and e all nice and quiet, standing patiently in line behind conscientious q. What’s not to like? Let’s ask Richard Larson, also known as “Dr. Q”: After some disastrous queuing at Sears to purchase a first bike for his son, Larson developed an abiding interest in applied queuing psychology. His consequential research added behavioral and psychological layers to what was already a well-developed mathematical discipline called queuing theory.
Joseph Brodsky offers the following advice in his famous essay “In Praise of Boredom“: “When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.” Replace “boredom” with any kind of negative feeling you experience while waiting, and it should be appropriate and sufficient fortification for this list.
Excerpted from his book on waiting, Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World, and structured as a modern how-to guide, this essay from Jason Farman presents waiting as a contextual, relational, collective act, one that can be radically creative.
A story that’s well-known among architects and urban designers is the tale of how people stopped complaining about waiting for elevators in the skyscrapers of New York City. The story’s origins are in the post-Second World War building boom, with its massive increase of skyscrapers. One building’s manager brought in mechanical engineers and elevator companies to help him solve a daily problem: people were waiting too long for the elevators, and they were getting angry about it. After looking at the issue, the engineers and company representatives came back and said that this problem was unsolvable. But a psychologist who worked in the building came up with his own solution. According to one version of the story, the psychologist didn’t focus on elevator performance but on the fact that people felt frustrated with what was a relatively short wait. He concluded that the frustration was likely born out of boredom. With the approval of the building’s manager, he put up mirrors around the elevator waiting area so that people could look at themselves and others waiting. Thus, waiting became interesting. The complaints not only ceased immediately and completely, but some previous complainers actually applauded the building staff for improving the speed of the elevator service.
The Art of Waiting (Belle Boggs, Orion, February 2012)
PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER
Christopher Alexander was a brilliant, maverick architect. He wrote an unusual book that became a cult architecture manual: A Pattern Language. Each “pattern” is a case study of “a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment.” In this essay, Michael J. Lewis describes Pattern No. 150, A Place to Wait: a “protected quiet area” permitting waiting to be as full and positive as the rest of the day. What if we built our waiting spaces the way Alexander saw things? “When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole.”
It is spring, and Boggs is out for a walk in the woods. Thirteen-year cicadas are swarming from under the earth and flying up to the treetops. Surrounded by the fecund animal kingdom—a pair of eaglets, a clutch of feral kittens, a miracle gorilla pregnancy at the zoo—her mind worries and worries its most pressing concern, her own infertility.
Placing her visits to the reproductive endocrinologist’s office and her time with the assisted reproductive therapy (ART) community against the backdrop of the natural world, she contemplates the nature of biology, fertility, and motherhood. Written while wondering whether she might ever be able to conceive, this tender essay went viral before becoming a best-selling book.
Three years later, I invited a public health nurse to speak to a group of fifth graders I was teaching in North Carolina. The subject of her talk was “your changing bodies,” a reliable source of giggles, but the nurse, a beautiful and soft-spoken woman who happened to be blind, brought a hushed seriousness to the talk. She angled her face upward so that her lecture took on the air of prayer, and she handled the plastic anatomical models of the vagina and uterus reverently. “Your bodies are miracles,” she told the girls in a separate session. “They are built to have babies. That is the reason for menstruation, the reason for the changes your body will go through.”
“Your brains are miracles, too,” I told them later. “Bigger miracles than your uteruses. You don’t have to have a baby if you don’t want to.” But my words sounded feeble and undignified next to the nurse’s serene pronouncement.
Waiting Bodies in Dictatorial and Bordering Regimes (Léopold Lambert interviews Shahram Khosravi, The Funambulist, June 2021)
PLEASE STAND IN LINE
Khosravi’s output on this theme also includes an art book in collaboration with writers, scholars, artists, architects, and curators called Waiting — A Project in Conversation, as well as a short film with filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer simply called Waiting, which offers the “testimonies of three migrant men in Europe.”
Are you kept waiting? Or are you making others wait? Depending on the day, perhaps both? How do you feel about the wait, the view from either end? Whose time is worth more, whose life? Now scale these thoughts up to peoples, systems, states. See the stakes for what they are. The issue this interview (also available as a podcast) appears in is called “They Have Clocks, We Have Time.”
Khosravi is a former taxi driver, now an “accidental” professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University. Drawing inspiration from Martin Luther King’s concept of urgent “unwaiting,” he explores waiting as a “temporal praxis” with political dimensions—power and resistance. The interview is poignantly illustrated by artist Hayfaa Chalabi.
Who can wait and who can afford not waiting? Who can pay and jump over queues? Who can pay and not wait in refugee camps? Who can pay and not stand outside a government office somewhere. As Pierre Bourdieu put it, it is a form of domination: keeping people waiting without crashing their hope. You tell them, “Come back tomorrow.” “Come back tomorrow, come back”… this is really Kafkaesque! So you keep waiting, in the hope that something good will happen, something which never comes. This is very much a form of domination. And this is also a neoliberal mentality that turns waiting into something noble: if you are a good waiter, if you wait patiently and don’t complain, then you are a good citizen. In Farsi, and in Arabic, we use the words sabori, which means suffering patiently: the person who is supposed to do sabori endures and doesn’t complain. The same goes for Latin with patient, meaning to suffer and to endure. So, there is some added value to endure and to not protest. Keeping people waiting is reminding them of their place in a racial and gender hierarchy, and of course, a class hierarchy.
A Month Inside the World’s Largest Refugee Camp (Jidi Guo, Guernica, March 2026)
PLEASE WAIT
Read E. C. Osondu’s Caine Prize-winning short story “Waiting,” also for Guernica. “My friends in the camp are known by the inscriptions written on their t-shirts. Acapulco wears a T-shirt with the inscription, Acapulco. Sexy’s t-shirt has the inscription Tell Me I’m Sexy. Paris’s t-shirt says See Paris And Die.”
Cox’s Bazar in south Bangladesh is the world’s largest refugee camp. It “temporarily” houses more than a million Rohingya refugees displaced by the 2017 Myanmar genocide. Most have been there for over eight years.
Guo is a documentary filmmaker whose work champions non-mainstream voices and stories. She spends the holy month of Ramadan 2025 inside the camp making a cinéma verité piece. Her collaborators Ro Yassin Abdumonab and Sohel Khan are Rohingya human rights activists who live within the camp. This textured essay witnesses, among all the difficulties, “what dignity can look like when you have every reason to check out.”
Long-term confinement can do more than limit your movement—it can reshape what you believe is possible. In prisons, they call it institutionalization. In the camps, I sensed something similar. A slow redefinition of ambition. As if the boundaries of possibility had been redrawn inside the mind.
Some people refused to be shaped by those lines.
Over the course of the month, I got to know a young woman who wanted to carve out her own path. She had piercing eyes, and her long wavy hair was mostly tucked under her scarf. At just twenty years old, she didn’t mince her words when discussing the complex crisis. Her delivery, especially when addressing injustices, was crisp and exacting. . . . She told me her goal was to study political science. . . . Her vision was clear: if real change were to happen, it would require an intricate understanding of how power moves. She didn’t just want to raise her people’s voice or secure a better future—she wanted to understand the architecture of the world that enabled their erasure in the first place.
Before I Go (Paul Kalanithi, Stanford Medicine Magazine, February 2015)
PLEASE . . .
For readers going through difficult times of a similar nature, I would also point to Atul Gawande’s celebrated New Yorker essay “Letting Go” on waiting and the ethical conditions of modern dying, and Judith Kitchen’s Creative Nonfiction essay “Any Given Day” that claims terminal waiting as life itself: “This waiting. This interval of time we now call home. This given day.”
In 2014, Kalanithi, a brilliant young neurosurgeon at Stanford University, was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic lung cancer. He had never smoked a cigarette in his life. He and his wife Lucy, a former classmate, made the difficult decision to have a baby.
Facing his impending mortality and experiencing an altered perception of time, Kalanithi, who also had degrees in English literature and the history and philosophy of science and medicine, set his final thoughts to words. He died later the same year, at age 37. His posthumously published Pulitzer-finalist memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, sent a ripple around the world.
Our daughter was born days after I was released from the hospital. Week to week, she blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks of her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room.
Time for me is double-edged: Every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence—and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time, it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day. It is a tired hare who now races. But even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach. I plod, I ponder, some days I simply persist.
Everyone succumbs to finitude.
Patience: Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (Alan Jacobs, The Point, March 2020)
PLEASE TAKE A SEAT
In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s lovely 1998 film Wandafuru Raifu, the recently deceased wait at a kind of afterlife way station administered by earnest staff. Each must choose a single memory from their entire life, which the staff then meticulously recreate on film and loop for all eternity. In preparation, Kore-eda interviewed hundreds of people about their lives, lending a warmly intimate, documentary-style register to this treatment of waiting. Here is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s fond essay “After Life: In Memoriam” on Criterion.
Franz Jägerstätter was an Austrian farmer who refused to swear fealty to Hitler during the Second World War, and as a result, lost everything, including his own life. “The word “martyr” means “witness,” says Alan Jacobs, “the martyr is one who bears witness to the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, most typically by undergoing his or her own Passion.”
“The word “passion” comes from the Latin patior: to suffer,” Jacobs continues. “Patience,” the capacity to endure—lit through its historical, spiritual, esthetic facets here—also comes from the same root verb. When I study the etymology further, it says the verb is deponent, that is, passive in form but active in meaning. “The story of Franz Jägerstätter, as told by Terrence Malick, is a Passion narrative; a narrative of a witness; a mystery.”
I promise I have not done a bait-and-switch with the chosen quote below, but it is the opening of the essay, which will go on to ask more and more of you, as essays should.
A voice next to me murmured “Arm yourself with patience,” and then the door was opened. I entered a corner room on the second floor of a nondescript suburban office building, with blinds closed to keep out the Texas summer’s light and the heat that rose from the parking lot. I saw a desk on which sat three computer monitors and, against another wall, a large television. A few books stood on a shelf, a few more lay on the floor. There were office chairs of various descriptions and a low battered sofa. I was told that if I tapped the space bar of the computer keyboard and then turned to the television, I would see what I came to see.
Approximately four hours later I emerged from the room and asked for the location of the toilet. I needed to pee, but more than that I needed to compose myself, to wash my face, to take some deep breaths. After I did all that I returned to the room, where several people waited for me. I had just watched a rough cut of Terrence Malick’s new movie A Hidden Life, and Malick—he was the one who, in his soft Texas accent, had asked me to arm myself with patience—and his editors wanted to know what I thought. So I tried to tell them.
Bullet in the Brain (Tobias Wolff, The New Yorker, September 1995)
I had a notion that the short story chosen for the last piece should have something to do with extended, unresolved, absurd suspension in time. I considered Buzzati, Chekhov, and of course, Kafka. And then I remembered this beautiful Wolff story that starts with a waiting line inside a bank: “The line was endless.”
Anders is a cynical, seen-it-all-and-called-it-out book critic known for the “weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.” He possesses words. But when a bank robber’s bullet enters his brain and waits for a sweet, summery eternity in “brain time,” what does he see has been in possession of him?
“Fuck with me again, you’re history. Capeesh?”
Anders burst out laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, “Capeesh, oh, God, capeesh,” and at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.
The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and plowed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions. Because of their peculiar origin, these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium, the bullet was moving at nine hundred feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared with the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”
PLEASE DIM THE LIGHTS: “SHANTIH SHANTIH SHANTIH”
In 1922, in the strange disintegration after the First World War, the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot published a long poem called The Waste Land. It changed poetry, becoming one of its foundational modernist texts. Decades later, the poet William Carlos Williams would make a retro-anachronistic assessment: “It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it.”
For readers who want to push things even further into a mood of waiting as a condition of consciousness, here is the full text of The Waste Land from the Poetry Foundation, accompanied by a particularly warm rendition of “III. The Fire Sermon” (which takes its name from the Buddha’s Ādittapariyāya Sutta discourse) by Viggo Mortensen. And when you get to the final line, you will see that for all its vast, stagnant, disenchanted exhaustion, the poem could not resist a little Sanskrit prayer: “Shantih shantih shantih.” Peace, peace, peace.
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Carolyn Wells
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/04/14/waiting-reading-list-kanya-kanchana/
via IFTTT
Watch