Like a Peacock. Pan's Peacock?

We often perceive waiting as disempowering. Or maybe I should get off my royal soliloquey here. Until today I always felt that having to wait for anything was disempowering. Because if you're waiting, that's pretty much all you can do -wait. And wait. And wait some more. You cannot be proactive, you cannot take any action, you cannot take control... but you're left waiting.

And so in the social game of life and in evolutionary selection, we also often find ourselves waiting, waiting like good, well-socialized creatures. And then if you're me, one day, you decide that this is ridiculous -I ain't waitin' for nothin'. But when you look around for that bull that you've decided to very cliche-ly "grab by the horns", there is no bull. Lots of its excrement, but no actual bull. And then a wave of lava-hot fire sweeps over you and you're seething. Because who was it who got to decide these things anyway and why the bleep didn't anyone ever consult you about it? Like we can control nearly everything else about our lives -our performance, the extent to which we decide to give back to serve humanity, the way we express ourselves creatively (notice how very noble all of these endeavours are!) -and moreover, things always seem objectively better when we do control them. So in fact, things that we can't or don't control can't actually be that great.

And just to prove our point here with a concrete metaphor: we can't control public transportation (which is why it drives me up the wall most of the time!) and so what happens when that thing we can't control breaks down, or doesn't show up or the dumb new-turnstyle machines reject our fully-paid fare swipes? Nothing. And the nothing is inefficient, makes us miss the next connection, and just gets totally under our skin. It's the inaction, the nothing, that is the royal viral impotency that infects all these things over which we have no control. And ought we not to protest against such a thing? Should I not be redeemed for my precious time wasted? Should there not be some kind of cosmic justice here?

But how does one protest nothing? Especially when trying to do anything only makes more nothing? Which then only results in increased outrage for oneself (positive feedback... except it's not 'positive' at all)?

My sister has been taking a psych class lately and she shared the following insight: Across the animal kingdom, mostly, it's like how it goes for peacocks. The male bird struts about in all his Nature-given splendor, fanning out his tail of brilliantly coloured plumes, striving to impress the female... a 'vain chase' indeed. The female waits. She waits for the male to come strutting by. But here's the thing -she waits, but she also chooses. She gets to decide whether or not said male is good enough. So her waiting is in fact empowered (that is, if we set aside the fact that peacocks most likely do not have a consciousness or mind to feel either empowered or disempowered).

How do we translate this into our everyday human experience of how we feel about waiting, about all those things we can't control (but if we did, the world would be SUCH a better place, guaranteed!) -whether it's the bus, or the lack of available computers at the library, or the wheeze that follows the best workout of our life, or the inaction of others (whether that inaction is the teetering we see in politics, in business or in relationships). If everything can be related back to sex, then it follows that the peacock analogy should apply to all these other situations. The thing is, I'm still not convinced that not being able to control things can be empowering. Unless maybe if you have faith. But faith is like Peter Pan's shadow. It should stick once it's there, but sometimes it doesn't really, and then suddenly we wake up and find ourselves looking for it in a dresser drawer.

P.S. I know. I failed at not "we"ifying the whole darn thing. Well, I also "you"ifyed it and "one"ified it. Anyway, the point is, one cannot discuss these difficult matters of our common experience in the first person, singular.