Waiting: why you need to do it.

Recently, I realized I have zero patience. I literally do not have the time of day to wait for things or people. I just want everything to happen in my own time which is a bit of a stretch because that nearly never happens. Let me be clear, I am not stating this discovery on a positive note. Frankly, this impatience is a big minus and I feel like it is greatly affecting the quality of my life. 

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The other day, I was watching a Netflix show, and about two scenes into the movie, I had already seen enough. I was not going to watch this movie any longer because nothing I had seen so far immediately excited me when I hadn’t even seen close to half of it. Another time, I was talking to someone new and I was frustrated by how slowly they were, in my own opinion, progressing with our relationship. In my head, I was like, “what is going on with this person, why are we moving at this pace? why wouldn’t they catch up with me already?” when they were probably simply taking their own time too, you know? There are several other instances like these but these are the two most random examples that I can think of and are close enough to the picture that I am trying to paint. I don’t like to wait for things and I think it’s a bad habit. 

I understand that life can be weird. Because one minute, you are on a path and the next minute, by no instrumentation of yours, you have to pause. Basically, life isn’t straightforward and more importantly, as much as it seems as though we all lead the same lives, realities are often far apart. One would think that with all my “understanding”, I would be one who wants to at least take one step at a time, no? Haha. 

It’s why I made the decision earlier in this quarter that I would like to focus on learning to wait. Because in this time of instant gratification, where if you need to talk to someone, it only takes a millisecond to get a text back or when you need to eat, you can easily enjoy a 5-minute noodle to sate your hunger. I have been consumed by the over quickness of it all and I have altogether forgotten that there’s beauty in waiting for things to take their time, for plots to reveal themselves and for stories to unfold.

Waiting is such a drag, no lies but it’s important to acknowledge that for a lot of things, you can’t cut corners or jump phases just because you’re eager to get to the finish line. It just doesn’t work. Take, for example, pregnancies. Babies don’t form in conception, they have to go through a nine-month timeline before they become whole. Plants too. To be fair, I can’t even think of anything else in nature that doesn’t go through stages before it attains its maturation.

I don’t have it all figured out. Not even going to lie, I’m winging every single thing in my life at this time but if there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that I can do many things that I set my mind to. And on that note, I genuinely can’t wait to hack this patience thing, no pun intended.✌🏾

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