How much time do you set aside each day to play this game? We wait for just a few more minutes on the snooze button. We lumber along to sit on the porcelain throne. More minutes invested to wait for the toast to get it just right the second time.
Some like to warm up the car's engine. Mindless turning of the pages as you pretend to importantly catch up with the latest headlines in your train ride. Queuing up for that cup of takeaway Espresso. You lazily turn and watch in a sort of indifferent numbness at the snaking lines of cabs, cars, buses and cyclists all waiting for the lights. Sometimes green doesn't bestow any mercy should the peak hours get slightly too temperamental and you guess it, more waiting gets into the pipeline.
Oh you reach the office finally? Well done! Now, welcome to your second phase of waiting. The lift, the endless floors, your computer to boot up, your 0900 meeting. Should be a normal day before lunch time.
Anyway we face it, waiting is an impending game disastrously recognised as a required pest of modern times. I am pretty sure I can intelligently guess that there must had been some form of waiting in the primitive times but I can hardly be pressed to put together the vision of a caveman sitting with deathly focus upon the hunt swapping for the mindless "purpose-driven" lifestyle brought upon humanity by the convenience of invention and engineering.
Do we feel important waiting? Like I'm really-busy-can't-you-see waiting for my moronic nincompoop of a boss that serves a higher ambition in their lives in serving a permanent sentence to make sure we wait along the coffee which is getting stale in a cup inside that oh-so-important-glossy corporate meeting room. It's okay that I feel like an idiot but at least, hey, I look kind of important to the passing tea lady at the end of the corridor, right?
Or how about waiting for an unrequited love? Or chickening out in telling that girl of your dreams about how you feel despite all the self-help books cheering you on? What about the grieving spouse outside the operating theatre? How does one measure the patience of a mother yearning for the return of the prodigal son from his overseas studies?
Our dogs are waiting for their flight out into Australia to begin their 30-night quarantine. I must admit I'm already feeling the impending pang of emotions swirling somewhere between my throat and my brains. I miss them already even before they are on that plane! You do try to sneak in as many walks, snuggles, eye contact and silly moments of play as if the wait will be over. And for many of our family members, some of them had already turn the pages of goodbye with the silver linings of memories that these two amazing characters have brought into everyone's lives.
So maybe it's true. Some waits are important as they are in that moment. Waiting can be as fleeting as a passing moment that usually gets snuffed away like a dying flame when we are too busy moving on to pause and appreciate what real, meaningful waiting can translate into sometimes, some kind of a wonderful.
