I've recently been noticing that I've got a bad case of the Lulls. Such are the circumstances where you become hyper-sensitive to all of the times of the day where you are waiting or expecting something to happen but nothing does.
Most of us are familiar with lulls in conversation that can be awkward at times, depending on the opposing party, and often result in meta-thinking along the lines of "wow, this is a really long lull in the conversation." Depending on the length of the lull, other thought can often spring to mind, like sex, drugs, rock and roll, or maybe something as simple as which delectable flavor of Hamburger Helper are you going to prepare tonight. With classic cliches like "the silence is deafening", we often appreciate the lull in a crowd far more than the lull in a one to one conversation. As the number of non-mutes in a room increases the relative probability of a window where NONE of them are issuing sound is rare. In such a case, one is often thankful for availability of background music so that no one will hear if you pass wind in awkward situations.
The most natural environment for the modern lull: The Elevator... unavoidable without acting like a douche.
Of course there are plenty of situations where lulls can occur in solo life. Many occur with me as I sit waiting for technology to catch up with what I want to do. Whether it's waiting for a website to load or waiting for my PC to boot, I seem to spend a great deal of time waiting in my lull-like states for my plans to be executed.
The solo lull is, by no means, limited to technology. Let's face it, the best laid plans often go awry, or are dependent on external factors. It may be an airport delay, the wait for a pizza or courier at the front door, the time spent on hold through the endless circling patterns of automated telephone prompts when I call for customer service and keep pressing zero over and over again in the futile hope that I'll be able to speak to someone in Mumbai who knows nothing of my product or how to fix it or who I should really be speaking to instead.
Perhaps the most common solo lull occurs between the decision to lay down in bed and actually falling asleep. I have tried to maximize this lull by listening to podcasts as I fall asleep. It's not that podcasts always, by nature, put me into dreamland, but that the noise that occurs in my brain during a late night "can't sleep" lull is louder than any podcast.
And the lull is not subject to only a short term framework. The lull can take the form of stagnation. You may be in a lull and not even know it. The time between jobs is a lull, even though you may be doing day-to-day things. Lulls can last for years and, indeed, can overlap and co-exist with other events that are non-lull-like. Lulls can exist within entire societies. Consider the great technology lull of the black death in Europe. Sure, I know that it sounds a bit crass to reduce the plague deaths of millions of Europeans to a word as simple as lull, but you know the old adage: "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is lull-inspiring."
If we could only learn to maximize the lull potential, we could be far more productive as a people, but I have started to embrace the lull. Just as we appreciate things when held up against their opposites, we should learn to appreciate the lull for the time that we wish there was a lull. Perhaps in the distant future we will establish a lull storage device so that we can bank the lull of a customer service phone call and bring it back up during a really useful event like listening to someone tell you anything that starts with "I don't have to tell you..." Trust me; you'd love the lull at that point.