Waiting for my real life to start
Many people describe the same feeling. The life they have now is a waiting room. The real one will begin later: after the move, the degree, the new job, the right person. Years pass, and it still has not begun.
Anton Chekhov wrote a play in which this feeling has an address. The Three Sisters (1901) is about Olga, Masha and Irina Prozorov, who live in a provincial town and want to go back to Moscow.
A plan said on the first page
The play opens on Irina's name day. Their father, a general, died a year ago. Eleven years earlier he brought the family out of Moscow. Olga remembers the day they left: it was May, and everything in Moscow was in flower.
A few lines later the whole plan is said out loud. Irina finishes her sister's sentence:
"To go away to Moscow. To sell the house, drop everything here, and go to Moscow..."
— Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters, Act I, translated by Julius West, in Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series (Project Gutenberg #7986)
Olga answers: yes, and as soon as possible. Nothing stands in the way. The house could be sold. There is no law keeping them in the town.
What Moscow is for
Four acts pass. The sisters do not go. Moscow keeps coming up in conversation, and each time it means a little more: work that will make sense, the right people, love. In Act III Irina says what the audience has already guessed, that they will never go.
Chekhov never shows Moscow. It stays off stage for the whole play. That is its strength. A city you have not visited cannot disappoint you. As long as it is ahead, the life here can be counted as a draft.
The Moscow of the play is less a city than a picture of the place where real life starts. It can be a country, a salary, a body, a relationship. It works the same way whatever it is.
Why the train is not taken
The usual explanation for waiting is laziness or fear. The play suggests another one. Going to Moscow would mean finding out what Moscow really is. It might turn out to be a city with headaches and dull work of its own. Then there would be no place left where life begins.
So the picture is protected by distance. The sisters keep it the way one keeps a letter unopened. Meanwhile the house passes to their brother's wife, and the town fills their years.
Chekhov does not judge them for it. He lets the audience see what the sisters cannot: the waiting has a price, and it is paid in the present.
Other ways of not living now
Blaise Pascal described a related habit, the need to keep busy so as not to face one's own thoughts: why can't I sit alone with my thoughts. Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych arrives at the question too late: feeling like you're wasting your life.
The sisters sit between the two. They are not busy running from thought. They think about Moscow all the time. The thought itself does the work of keeping them in place.
A question to take away
The play does not say whether the sisters should have gone. It shows what the plan did for them while it stayed a plan.
What is my Moscow, and why am I not going there?
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