The Ethics of Attention: 2 Waiting as an Ethical Act

Waiting is usually treated as a defect.

In everyday discourse, to wait is to be delayed, obstructed, or left behind. Waiting appears as wasted time — a gap between intention and outcome, a suspension that ought to be minimised or eliminated. Systems are praised for reducing waiting; individuals are praised for overcoming it.

From the perspective developed here, this attitude already reveals a misunderstanding.

Waiting is not the absence of action. It is a mode of relation.

Within a relational ontology, meaning does not arrive fully formed, nor does it pre-exist its instantiation. Meaning actualises only insofar as relations are sustained long enough for something to take shape. Waiting names the discipline of sustaining those relations without forcing their closure.

This is why waiting is ethical.

To wait is to refuse the demand that meaning justify itself immediately. It is to resist converting appearance into outcome, phenomenon into product. Waiting holds open the interval in which further construal remains possible.

Importantly, waiting is not anticipation. Anticipation projects a future resolution and measures the present against it. Waiting, by contrast, suspends projection. It does not lean forward. It stays.

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is often read as a meditation on futility or despair. But such readings already betray impatience. The play does not depict waiting as failure; it stages waiting as structure. Nothing happens because something is being protected: the openness of the situation itself.

The characters do not wait for meaning to arrive. They wait with one another, within a situation that refuses to resolve. Their waiting is not oriented toward success or revelation. It is oriented toward remaining.

This distinction matters. When waiting is subordinated to outcome, it appears empty unless rewarded. When waiting is understood as relational discipline, it is already full — not of events, but of attentiveness.

Minimalist practices make this visible. In music, repetition and duration are often mistaken for monotony. But what repetition actually does is slow the listener’s interpretive reflexes. It prevents rapid assimilation and forces attention to remain with small variation, texture, and drift.

Here again, waiting is not lack. It is calibration.

The ethical dimension emerges most clearly when waiting is withdrawn. Impatience is not merely a psychological trait; it is an ontological intervention. To refuse to wait is to collapse the space in which meaning could have emerged otherwise. It is to demand closure where openness was still viable.

This is why waiting cannot be automated or optimised without remainder. A system can reduce delays, but it cannot decide when waiting is required. That judgement depends on responsibility to the situation — on a sensitivity to when closure would be violent rather than clarifying.

Waiting, then, is not passivity. It is restraint.

It is the decision not to tighten the cut too soon.

Within the ethics of attention, waiting names the moment when attention resists both distraction and mastery. It stays present without demanding progress. It allows duration to do its work.

Later episodes will examine how waiting can be exhausted, overwhelmed, or exploited. But for now, the essential point is simple:

Waiting is not what happens when nothing happens.

It is what makes it possible for something to happen without being forced.

To wait is to take responsibility for openness itself.