Waiting for the Miracle to Come

If you’re like me, then since childhood you’ve experienced this feeling that’s always there. This relentless whisper: the real life is coming. Not this, not yet, not now. But something is approaching. The real thing. Soon. You’ve been waiting for it a long time, and it’s coming, it is right there, shimmering, inches away, a life and sunbeams all around. You’re almost there. But you never reach out and actually touch it. You are not ready yet, you first need to get properly prepared. Rehearse everything. But it’s coming. It has to be. Very, very soon, it’s coming. The real life is coming. It must. For sure. It must come. It has to. Right?

One of Leonard Cohen’s songs is called “Waiting for the Miracle” which is precisely the idea I’m trying to talk about here.

You know the voice. “I’m not gonna start the blog yet – I’ll wait till I have something really groundbreaking to share.” Or the girl smiling at you on the bus – not now, there’ll be a better time. The details change but the logic never does: the real thing is coming, so for now, just wait. Or the more subtle thought: “I will try it, maybe, but I’m not gonna try a lot, let’s see, but for sure not gonna give it my best, because…” (Essentially this sentence but covered in a lot of bullshit)

Then it never comes, and it’s too late, and you are dead. Your life slipped by.

The funny thing is that you even realize you are avoiding doing things you want to do, but why? Why do you do this when you know better? I don’t think the waiting is laziness (in fact, you might be quite busy). It’s protection. If you never really start to do things you want to do, fully committed with your full power, you never discover your actual limits. You get to keep the fantasy that you could have been extraordinary. The moment you commit fully and fail, that comfortable ambiguity collapses. So the deferral isn’t stupidity – it’s a bargain with yourself. A bad one, but understandable.

Nietzsche found this bargain absolutely disgusting. His Last Man is precisely this figure: the one who has optimized for comfort, who risks nothing. He doesn’t want anything that could hurt him – not great love, not great work, not any endeavor whose failure would actually wound. He can keep all options theoretically open, which means he chooses nothing. He lives long and comfortably and calls it a life. Nietzsche’s point is that willingness to be hurt by something is the price of admission to anything that matters. The Last Man never pays it. He dies warm and safe, still waiting for the miracle to come.

No one stated the problem more clearly than Seneca. In his essay On the Shortness of Life, he writes that “…all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live.” Always preparing. Two thousand years and it’s still true.

So. To stop waiting for the miracle to come, stop waiting for the miracle to come.