Waiting

By Kathleen

“How much of human life is lost in waiting?”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick. Sometimes, waiting is an excruciating process. These are the times when waiting is the foremost thing that’s being accomplished.

“Wait your turn.”

“I’ll be with you shortly.”

“Just hold on a sec.”

“You’ll just have to be patient.”

“Let’s wait and see.”

We’ve all heard these colloquialisms that leave us feeling unsatisfied, wondering how much longer our lives will be put on hold. We try to remind ourselves that “Patience is a virtue.”

Waiting is something I do everyday, starting with lying in bed--enjoying the last minutes of bliss before an unwelcome interruption from my alarm. I wait for class to end, the school day to end, and then for practice to end. I arrive home starved and wait for dinner to be ready. Whether it’s these everyday instances of waiting—in line at the grocery store, at stoplights, and through TV commercials—or whether it’s waiting for something on a larger scale, like the next, better, phase of life. Waiting takes up a tremendous amount of time.



I recently endured an exhausting waiting experience. It ended the day of my driver’s license test. I had waiting sixteen years already, and finally, I was down to anxious anticipation throughout the morning and afternoon. Now, I only had forty more dreadful minutes to wait. My mom was supposed to pick me up early, but of course, she was late. Stressed, concerned, and apprehensive, I nervously plucked at my split ends while peering out the front window every fourth second. Ten minutes behind schedule, we arrived at the less than affable Department of Motor Vehicles, and I immediately ran to the first line—and waited. I reached the front and explained I was there for my driver’s test. The bitter woman directed me to a second line—to wait yet again. This time, after finally reaching my destination, the lady lazily peered over her shoulder, looked at the clock, and tersely pointed out that we were six minutes late. She explained that, “Here at the DMV, we run on a tight schedule—I’ll make an exception just this once.” After a stern glare, she told me to pull my car around to the front overhead. There, while watching other drivers come and go, I waited, and waited, and waited some more. I performed stress-relieving exercises for at least a half-hour, but the stress of waiting wouldn’t go away. Finally, I apprehensively drove away with my instructor, awaiting my fate. If I didn’t pass, I would have to wait another month for the next opportunity.

‘To wait’ derives from Middle English, from Anglo-French “waiter, or guaiter-- to watch over, await.” All living things are waiting. Wild animals wait for prey, dogs wait for walks, cats wait for food, and humans wait for, well, what exactly?

Humans await the next portion of life. At times, we’ve all just wanted to get through the day—to hear that three o’clock bell chime as if it were the ticket to freedom. But perhaps we’re waiting for something bigger. Some wait for summer, then graduation, and then college. And then we’ll wait for that perfect career and apartment, and then we wait for love—which turns into waiting for marriage, for the missed menstrual cycle, then for the baby to arrive. In an astral second, it seems we’re waiting for retirement. But if we’re not simply waiting for our present stage to end, perhaps we’re happily awaiting an event we’ve been excited about for months.

The act of waiting conjures up something negative, yet the act of anticipating is arguably the sweetest part of life. These forms of ‘interim time’ are so incredibly different. Usually, when people are in the act of waiting, they are bored, restless, and merely marking time towards some point in the near future. Anticipating is so much more—it’s waiting with excitement for something to happen. When we were young, we would spend days waiting in anticipation of Christmas, or our birthday. We would start count-downs months in advance, begin making invitations, dreaming of those mysterious gifts crowding the base of the family Christmas tree. Eventually, we grow older and spend less time anticipating holidays. Our anticipation turns to things like graduation, careers, and a wedding day. To anticipate is a wonderful thing, and as long as we are living each day fully we are not waiting.

Christopher Columbus did not wait for somebody else to discover the New World. Abraham Lincoln didn’t wait for the next President to free the slaves. Neil Armstrong didn’t wait for the next astronaut to fly to the moon; instead he launched himself into fame while gracefully securing the American Flag onto dusty particles of the Moon. These great historic figures that we look up to as role models did not wait for life to come to them. These heroic men took action. They knew what they wanted, and they made it happen.

We “ordinary folks” should spend less time waiting as well. We all have a purpose in this world, and we should not let purpose pass us by because we’re too busy waiting for something new.