Attention
How to Wait Without Waiting: The Joy of Immediacy
Personal Perspective: Lessons from Burning Man about living immediately.
Updated September 6, 2025 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
I just got back from my first time at Burning Man, that wild experiment where tens of thousands of people gather in an inhospitable desert for art, music, and the roll of the dice that is humanity. I expected nudity. I expected alcohol. I expected dazzling art and limited sleep. But here’s what I wasn’t prepared for: the waiting.
And yet, it was in that waiting that I found some wisdom worth bringing back, both for my own life and for anyone navigating life’s pauses.
Waiting Immediately
Even if we set aside the airports and buses to get there, once on the Playa, I waited four hours to get our car out, while others waited up to 20 hours to get in. Workshops often started on “Playa time” (i.e., late). There were long lines for food, ice, and drinks. We gathered for hours to watch the Man burn, and on more than one night, we hunkered down through dust storms.
At Burning Man, though, waiting has a counterpoint: immediacy, one of the community’s 10 principles. It’s an invitation not to get lost in the past or the future, but to be open to what each moment offers. That might mean stumbling on a lemonade station, accepting a pickle from a stranger, or stepping into a tango workshop just because you walked by. And yes, it also means practicing immediacy when we’re fed up about standing in line.
The Reframe
Waiting isn’t naturally pleasant. We want to get to the thing we queued up for. Thanks to negativity bias, our attention narrows to what’s missing, amplifying the sense that we are waiting for real life to happen once we finally get to the front of the line.
And waiting goes far beyond lines. We wait in doctors’ offices, in traffic, in wedding-party holding rooms. We wait on test results, a text back from a first date, news about a job, the child, the dream house. I’ve felt it most in my search for a life partner. Friends have partnered up and had kids, while I—at 39—haven’t yet. At times, it made life feel diminished, as if it hadn’t really begun.
But as Viktor Frankl reminds us, when we cannot change our circumstances, we can still choose our response. Psychologists call this reframing or cognitive flexibility, shifting how we interpret an experience so it feels different. When we move from “I’m wasting time” to “I’m connecting or noticing,” the entire moment changes.
Connection doesn’t begin when the workshop starts; it begins in the line to get in, or in the silence before things officially begin. To take my example of a partner, if I desperately want to love and be loved, why not start now, with the friends and family and strangers around me?
Not Waiting Anymore
After the first hour in that four-hour exit line, I decided to stop waiting. I got out of the car and started talking to people. I shared peanut butter pretzels and heard about their journeys, how they handled the storms. I saw people making mac and cheese in the dust, a woman and her son passing out gummy bears, and a man showing people their reflections in a silver ball.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, I stopped feeling like I was waiting. That line became one final chance to connect, which was the whole reason I endured the Burning Man gauntlet in the first place.
Four Ways to Stop “Waiting”
- Recognize the discomfort. Notice the restlessness instead of fighting it.
- Do what you can. Catch the server’s eye, check the map, make a plan.
- Broaden your perspective. Counteract negativity bias by widening your lens: Notice the people around you, the birds outside, or the way the light falls in the room.
- Decide not to wait. Treat the blank space as life itself: Start a conversation, pull out a book, or simply breathe.
Where Are You Waiting?
Luckily, if you will, life abounds with opportunities to practice not waiting. Maybe you’re at the airport for a delayed flight, in line for a concert, waiting to be checked in at a yoga studio, or staring at a pot of water that refuses to boil. These small moments are practice for the bigger ones: the job, the partner, homeownership, or some other purported markers of “real life” beginning.
A friend of mine, Pete, says he loves it when people are late. It gives him the time to meditate that he can’t otherwise find. In those moments, he’s not waiting for them to arrive; he’s grateful for the extra minutes with his own mind and breath.
Here’s your invitation to embrace immediacy and believe that your life—dusty, single, or otherwise—is not deficient, but already unfolding. So what are you waiting for?
