Waiting for the Miracle to Come

You may be aware of a feeling that’s been there since childhood. It whispers: the real life is coming. Not this, not yet, but it’s approaching. You’ve been waiting for the real life a long time, and it’s coming, and there will be a lot of sunbeams too. But you didn’t feel it yet. It’s okay, it says, you are not ready yet, you first need to get prepared properly. Rehearse a lot. But it’s coming for sure. It has to be. Very, very soon, it’s coming. It must come. 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.

It gets more personal and whispers something more: I won’t start the blog yet – let’s wait till I have something really groundbreaking to share. Or when the girl was smiling at you on the bus – it said: let’s not smile back and say hi, not now, there’ll be a better time. Or the following naked statements stripped of the bullshit we add to them: “I will try it, maybe, but it’s stupid” or “I’m not gonna try a lot, let’s see” “I’m not gonna give it my best, because…”

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 always keep one foot out the door, but why?

It is 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 indefinitely, which means he chooses nothing. He lives long and comfortably. Nietzsche’s point is that the willingness to be hurt by something is the price of admission to anything that matters. The Last Man dies warm and safe, still waiting for the miracle to come.

Seneca, quoting Epicurus, wrote about this problem too: “The fool, with all his other faults, has this also - he is always getting ready to live.” Two thousand years ago and it’s still true.

So, what to do?

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