5/ The Waiting Game
Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.
-- Søren Kierkegaard
Having received the unexpected news about the unavailability of our long-term residence, we now found ourselves in a state of waiting for our life in Oaxaca to begin. Each apartment or hotel room was a temporary assignment; we couldn’t alter them in any significant way to make them more livable. Because we didn’t want to add to our already sizeable heap of belongings before moving on to the next temporary place, we actively refrained from buying anything new. Grocery shopping was a very limited affair: milk, juice, cereal, bananas, water, crackers, a chocolate bar and maybe some beer: these were the sundries with which we contented ourselves at home.
As a result we were eating out most of the time, and while that afforded us the opportunity to explore the huge assortment of restaurants, cafes, street carts and other foody holes-in-the-wall that Oaxaca has to offer, it meant that a certain amount of mental energy (and financial resources) had to be expended every day deciding what, and where, the next meal would be. Even in Mexico, where dining out is relatively cheap, it starts to add up after a while.
In spite of being in a continual state of transition, we were keeping pretty busy: attending language classes, engaging in intercambios (scheduled language exchanges with native speakers), exploring new neighborhoods on foot, visiting little shops and galleries, and taking in the lively, colorful and increasingly boisterous events leading up to La Guelaguetza. Life, as they say, was going on.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to be distracted from where you are by paying too much attention to where you aren’t—and frustration with our living situation was mounting by the day. Without going into too much detail, each new move brought with it a novel collection of irritants, which tended to create the discomfiting illusion that the closer we were getting to our destination, the faster it was receding away. We found ourselves spending a lot of time venting to each other, and we often had to remind ourselves to stay focused on why we came here in the first place.
One good way to accomplish this is to adopt the Spanish phrase “Así es” as your mantra. It usually means “That’s right” or “So it is,” and is generally applied to some specific thing, such as “Así es la vida”—That’s life. But for us it has become shorthand for “It is what it is—get over it!” For example: “The bathroom floor is flooded!” Así es. “I thought she said there was WiFi here!” Así es. “Is that a slug in the bedroom?!?” Así es. And so on.
In life there are simply some things that you can’t control or change, and as we were rapidly discovering, this is especially true in Mexico. Chalk it all up to a massive and self-inflicted test of our own patience.
The art of waiting in Oaxaca.
Never the easiest of traits to master, the pursuit of patience can be either a passive or an active practice. On the one hand sits the Buddha: in lotus position, hands resting comfortably in his lap, half-lidded gaze fixed on eternity, beyond all earthly concerns. On the other hand, Stan and Martha: hot and sweaty, anxious and grumpy, taking a decidedly more aggressive approach to confronting our frustrations: leave town for a few days.
Thus, our brief detour to the city of Puebla.
