Waiting
They also serve who only stand and wait
John Milton (1673)
This is not the usual bored or restless kind of waiting that is a denial of the present ... It is not a waiting in which your attention is focused on some point in the future and the present is perceived as an undesirable obstacle that prevents you from having what you want. There is [another] kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will miss it.
Eckhart Tolle (1997)
Milton sought to wait on God’s wishes, with the patience to
attend
A number of pages, such as this, touch on the theme of attending.
and bear his problems lightly. He would not have known that the same
theme
Compare Milton with Hume seeming to have (by the mid 1700s) heard of Buddhism.
had been of major importance to a Buddhist perspective on the other side of the world for two millennia. Tolle offers alert waiting as a goal for us all - whatever our burdens. But today waiting seems to be getting harder. I remember the queues in shops, before self service, the shop keeper collecting each item individually for each shopper. We waited a lot. Now we fume if the service is not instant. We have forgotten how to wait, and ipso facto how to attend. We are ruled by an idea of some future situation, which is presently only within our
heads:
The distinction between what seems to be and what we think might be, is always valuable.
eating the meal, which the waiter is failing to bring, trumps the present gentle conversation. Both writers saw the virtue of attending in waiting: it may not be easy to attend to the
present,
The concept of the ‘present’ has many aspects and many problems.
but surely they are right, it is vital that we learn to be able to ‘stand and wait’.
Milton’s sonnet When I consider how my light is spent was, a hundred years later, given the title we are now familiar with: On his blindness. The Tolle quote is from page 78 of the Hodder and Stoughton 2005 edition of The Power of Now.
The photograph was taken in the entrance area of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hà Nội.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 3rd January 2026
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