Some of the most antagonizing moments in
our lives are probably those that make us wait.
And being the impatient people that we are, we can become very annoyed when
we have to wait. And having to wait only
makes the event we are waiting for seem like it is never going to get here.
Remember when you were a kid and your
folks told you that you were going on vacation.
As soon as you got into the car you began to ask: “Are we there yet?” As we got older, we could understand the
concept of time better and knew that some passing of time was necessary to take
a journey from one place to another and this amounted to our having to let time
pass by waiting!
However, merely comprehending the concept
of time having to pass has never really satisfied our human desire to have
things “NOW!” and not have to wait.
We constantly have to fight the urges of being impatient and wanting
things right away.
I always think of the character Veruca
Salt in the movie of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (actually from the
book, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”).
This little girl is depicted as an immature, over-indulged and
manipulative person. Veruca’s affluent
parents treat her like a princess and give her anything she wants, no matter
how ridiculous the price. Within the
movie version of the story, she begins to stomp her feet and singing which express
her feelings that the things she MUST have, she wants NOW! She makes well-known the bratty attitude of her
character.
Although we may not demonstrate the degree
of demanding impatience as did the character Veruca Salt, we have probably at
times been just as determined that something we wanted, we wanted it NOW! Hopefully our situation didn’t turn out as
badly as it did for our dear Veruca?
When
I was in the military, it seemed that almost everything we did was to be done
in a hurry. However, whatever the
activity, we would always have to “hurry up and wait!” We would have to muster out of the barracks
as quickly as we could just to stand in formation and wait for our next
command. We always seemed to rushing
from this place to that place and then would have to stand in formation and
wait!
It is said that not all waiting is a bad
thing. Perhaps waiting until we understand
things better or have more experience in a specific subject or ability could be
very beneficial. You’ve probably heard
it said that “good things come to those who wait.”
That expression is actually a synonym for
the proverbial saying “patience is a virtue.”
Which means that patience is usually rewarded, and that people who are
patient will often get what they want and achieve their goals and desires, in
time!
Where do you think that saying came
from? Most often the expression is
usually credited to British poet Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie, who wrote under
the pseudonym Violet Fane. She used the
saying in her poem “Tout Vient a Qui Sait Attendre” (likely written in
the late 1800s) with the lines that read: “All hoped-for things will come to
you who have the strength to watch and wait.”
And so today we continue to spout that
saying to our children, to our friends, and family members when we are trying
to help them realize that they need more patience within their lives.
However, regardless of how we might try to
do otherwise, the passing of time will continue to flow at the speed that it
has been designed to do. We can, in
actuality, do nothing to speed it up or to slow it down. While keeping ourselves occupied we may perceive
that time is passing more quickly or more slowly, but the truth of the matter
is, time is passing the same regardless of our perception of it. As another old saying puts it “a watched pot
never boils.” But we know that it will
boil. It is only our perception
of the passage of time that affects how the passing of that time is conceived.
As in our youth we think that time is
moving so slowly that we must wait for everything to come to pass. When we have gotten older, it seems that the
passage of time has become much faster and we are almost unable to keep up with
it passing before our very eyes. That’s
the way our perception of time works until we reach a point when we are only
waiting for the passing of time to end.
This is part of our linear existence and the fact that we’re only
human!
QUOTE TO CONSIDER
"If you weren't waiting,
WHAT would you be doing?"
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