I’ve recently had some possibly scary blood test results, which still need the interpretation of my family doctor—whom I won’t be able to see until the end of next week. I am also awaiting an ultrasound, which has been moved around and now won’t be until next week, either. All of this waiting and uncertainty—particularly during a time when we are facing the loss of health insurance in a couple of weeks—has me in absolute knots. I’m having a harder time concentrating, which is to be expected, I think, and I get scared at unexpected points throughout the day.

However, all of this waiting, as unbearable as it seems, can be a good thing. Here are a couple of things that can be positive about waiting during uncertain times.

• Experiencing the wait. This sounds absurd, but we spend our entire lives chasing after happy feelings that when we don’t feel them we feel as if we have to change the way we feel or what we’re going through immediately. We act like we simply can’t sit with pain or suffering or worry; that we are unable to handle such emotions and situations. However, we really can; in fact, isn’t that why humans have evolved so much, how we’ve survived so many wars and colonization and disease? Waiting reminds us of that humanity.
• Waiting allows us to be mindful. My word for 2011 is mindfulness, and I constantly still have to remind myself to live in the moment. I’m a big planner, and live a lot of my life in the someday rather than the today. It’s really a wasteful way to live. In this waiting period, I know that it’s possible that many things could be wrong with me, or nothing could be wrong, and that either way, it could be the biggest blessing of the year. I just have to remain open without labeling this time.

What I also know about waiting, however, is that I don’t want all of the information available to me. I don’t want to analyze my own symptoms, guess at what might be wrong, and worry myself into oblivion over what might be just…nothing. So waiting also allows us to trust ourselves, trust our bodies, and simply be still within the experience. It’s hard, sure, and it’s taken me a few days to get to this point (as it always does; I even broke out in hives during my initial treatment for my symptoms out of sheer worry), but once you get there, it’s a humbling, Zen-like experience.