Hold On The Life, Science, and Art of Waiting

What do you do when you're not asleep and when you're not eating? You're most likely waiting--to finish work, to get home, or maybe even to be seen by your doctor. Hold On is less about how to manage all that "staying where one is until a particular time or event" (OED) than it is about describing how we experience waiting. Waiting can embrace things like hesitation and curiosity, dithering and procrastination, hunting and being hunted, fearing and being feared, dread and illness, courting and parenting, anticipation and excitement, curiosity, listening to and even performing music, being religious, being happy or unhappy, being bored and being boring. They're all explored here. Waiting is also characterized by brain chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine. They can radically alter the way we register the passing of time. Waiting is also the experience that may characterize most interpersonal relations--mismanage it at your own risk.

Hold On contains advice on how to cope with waiting-how to live better-but its main aim is to show how important the experience of waiting is, in popular and highbrow culture, and, sometimes, in history. Detouring into psychology, neurology, ethology, philosophy, film, literature, and especially art, Peter Toohey's illuminates in unexpected ways one of the most common of human experiences. After reading his book, you'll never wait the same way again.

Peter Toohey was born in Australia. After teaching for many years in at the University of New England in Australia, he is now a professor of classics at the University of Calgary, Canada. He was educated at Monash University, Australia and at the University of Toronto. He is particularly interested in the nature and representation of difficult emotional and physical conditions, how people cope with these, and how individuals sometimes turn these to their own advantage.

Illustrations
Prologue
Chapter 1: "Everyone is just Waiting": Three versions of the experience of waiting
Chapter 2: Alan Rabinowitz Encounters A Jaguar. Are some brains better at waiting than others?
Chapter 3: Hall Porter Senf's Wife Is in Labor. Childbirth, friendship, marriage, and waiting.
Chapter 4: Happiness - is it just a matter of waiting to meet your double? A chapter on the life and the lore of waiting and of fulfillment
Chapter 5: Miles Davis Breaks for A Smoke: The power and the pleasure in pausing
Chapter 6: Dithering: A chapter on the strategic advantages of indecisive waiting.
Chapter 7: Heaven Can Wait: that empty chair, waiting, and the beyond.
Chapter 8: "The Littler Waiting Room." Can you make the best of dread - and of waiting for approaching death?
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes