Have you ever stopped to think about waiting? We spend so much time just waiting for some things to happen, other things to pass. Consider the moments of waiting that happen over the course of a typical day: on line at a register, in traffic, in a doctor’s office, on a plane, etc. The very concept of waiting — a momentary suspension of activity or delayed action until a specific event happens — seems to suggest that we have to be in some mode of action at all times during our waking hours. Being idle has come to be a bad thing, and waiting itself has a generally negative connotation because the thing you want is not in the present but locked away in some defined or undefined point in the future. Time needs to pass before that desired state can come to be. And oh how we pass our time!

To me, commuting by mass transit is the perfect encapsulation of waiting, next to air travel. Commuting can be considered a form of routine waiting. It’s finite, scheduled, expected, and for that reason, we find ways to pour our lives and lifestyles into that span of time. Rituals, habits, indulgences all make their way into our commutes. Over the years as a regular commuter to and from New York City, I’ve observed a growing but unsurprising trend: devices have come to dominate the commuting experience. I regularly scan my subway car to see how many people are using a smartphone, tablet, e-reader, or other gadget. Most of the time, the majority of passengers are immersed in some tech-enabled activity: reading, listening to music, playing video games, watching movies. Signal permitting, people are chatting away, texting, snapping selfies, scrolling through streams of social media updates, or typing in updates of their own. It’s bad enough that we actually are capable of doing all of those things in a shared public space like a subway car or bus, that these are all options for things you can do when you have nothing else to do. The real problem is twofold. First, we haven’t yet learned how to distinguish what we should do from what we shouldn’t do in those situations. Second, and more the focus of this post, we don’t really know how to deal with moments of pause in an activity- and device-free way — to simply embrace the wait.

Reframing the meaning of those quiet, interstitial spaces in our lives requires an understanding of what we’re doing with the busy, booked-up blocks of time on our daily agenda and why. Most of us measure our personal worth or success by our productivity and accomplishment. We feel good about ourselves when we get more stuff done, so we work very hard to do more and more. In school and at work, we often get rewarded not just for scoring higher on a performance scale (like an A+ or a 100%) but for occupying our time with as many extracurricular activities as possible. We try our hardest to exclaim to the world “I am NOT idle! I am highly driven and motivated to succeed!” but what we achieve in the end is little more than exhaustion.

Filling empty space to capacity is a common habit, whether it’s our calendars, our closets, or our stomachs. We do no different to our brains. I would argue that the concept of information overload has less to do with us being bombarded by information from lots of external sources than with us deliberately saturating our own attention with more information than we need. If we’re drinking from the firehose of information, as they say, we’re also the ones holding the hose to our own mouths and controlling the valve. Devices that connect us to the plethora of information in the world and in our lives are not necessarily at fault. They just make it far too easy to indulge in our existing impulses, especially when we think there’s nothing better we should be doing than funneling our attention into a small glowing rectangle that’s conveniently within arm’s reach.

So what else should we be doing if we can’t play with our devices? My simplistic answer: Do as little as possible or nothing at all.

If sleep is the chance we have to rest our bodies and sort out all the memories we’ve collected during the day, what chance do we have during our waking hours to reset our minds and make sense of our experiences and our lives? Sure, there’s meditation, yoga, running, hiking, and many other mind-easing pursuits to help us gain perspective and focus, but what about those in-between waiting moments sprinkled throughout the day? I like lists, so here are five techniques I find useful:

1. Create and capture rather than consume: Carry a notepad or small journal and write out what’s on your mind (yep, with a real pad and a real pen, no apps). It doesn’t matter whether you write or draw or both, and it doesn’t matter if it looks/sounds good or not, so long as you allow yourself to express whatever has accumulated in your head. Even sitting somewhere and describing what you see can be interesting.
2. Do some creative visualization: I wrote about this technique in an earlier post, but it’s worth resurrecting. Whether you believe it works or not, it’s a remarkably calming exercise to envision a goal or end result you want to achieve in as crisp and vivid detail in your mind as possible. Give it form, color, texture, smell — whatever will bring it to life. With repeated practice, you might be surprised with the outcome.
3. Work out unresolved issues: Unpack a problem that’s on your mind. Don’t simply replay what went wrong over and over. Look at it from different angles, step outside your shoes, identify the things you didn’t know or understand clearly.
4. Move around: Lots of waiting involves sitting for prolonged periods. Movement, even in small ways, can be beneficial. There are many kinds of simple, low-impact exercises that can be done while seated or that require little space.
5. Daydream: Really, why not? Let yourself stare out the window of a bus or train, watch the clouds go by, observe people bustling about, or just take in your surroundings.

Waiting can be about much more than waiting, and it can certainly involve more than the digital pacifiers we carry around with us. We need to reframe waiting as an opportunity to disconnect from the task-driven part of ourselves that craves stimulation and reconnect with the other, quieter part that longs for stillness, peace, and reflection. Maybe we can start to think anew about waiting as the space between notes of music, a deep breath after a steep climb, a blank page dividing chapters of a book, or a welcoming patch of green space in a towering, grey city.