The Waiting Room

Patience is a virtue, or at least I think it use to be. I have always thought that I was a patient person, never complaining, quietly biding my time til whatever or whoever it was that I was waiting for emerged. I am noticing though that more often I seem to be losing my patience. It's a trait I noticed in people I know growing older as well, that their patience wears thin at the best of times too. It makes me wonder if it is just something we go thru as we age or is it more of an individual thing? Is it really patience we are losing or is it just that we seem to be waiting more and more?

We wait in lines, we wait at signs, we wait for people, we wait on situations, we seem to be in a perpetual state of waiting. But what are we really waiting for? Are we waiting on life, are we waiting on death, are we waiting on God or are we waiting for something bigger and better to come along? We wait for our ship to come in, we wait for our luck to change, we wait for word of news, we wait on time and only seem to be losing even more time while we are waiting.

Now is when a lot of you will be reading this blog and thinking who has time to wait? My life is so busy I don't have time to be standing by idly waiting....but waiting you do without even consciously knowing it. You wait for appointments, you wait for the end of the work day, you wait on laundry to finish, you wait on your dinner to finish cooking, you wait on loved ones, and you wait ...and you wait ....and you wait in your life. Oh sure we fill that time of waiting with other things and trying to be productive, but you catch yourself saying to yourself, "this is just what I was waiting for" or 'you don't know how long I have been waiting to hear that", or some other thing that you weren't even realize you were waiting for until it arrives. I think we spend so much of our life waiting we don't even realize we are doing it.

I am starting to think we each have our own individual waiting room in this life. I think maybe the world is not really round at all but flat like they first envisioned. They just assumed that the earth was round because they got tired of waiting to get to the other side and ended up just going in circles. I think the earth is square, or rectangular...just a big building made up of waiting rooms for each of us. Some waiting rooms are opulent with a terrific view of the outer world, and some waiting rooms are just four plain walls with a rickety chair and out of date magazines.

So we wait. Time seems to stand still when we wait for something important to us, and then we look back and think wow has time flown since then. Not only has it flown but it has taken my patience with it.

I have a friend that once said, that when we are kids, time seems to drag because we wait with anticipation for things, as we get older time flies because we don't have that same anticipation that we did as a child. Time may seem like it is dragging by but the years seem to go faster. Maybe my friend has a point there. I have noticed how a lot of people I know seem to lose their patience in waiting as well. Maybe we are just sick and tired of waiting because we have already done so much of it. Maybe we think of it as time wasted with waiting and the sand in the hourglass seems to be trickling faster.

Time drags...and time flies, and still we wait. I have begun to think of life as not being so much about the journey as they tell us, but more about the waiting, and what we do or not do while we wait. A lot of you will read this blog and say, "Vic find a new hobby or something, stay busy". I am busy, it's not about spare time needing to be filled. It's about waiting and how at times we don't even realize we are doing it. But we do...a lot of it when you think about it. If you don't believe me, just you wait and see.