It was a morning worth writing books on. The park was serene. That wasn’t a surprise, especially because the clock read 5.07 am. What really surprised him, was that after a long time, he felt like writing a note. There were things that have been missing for him, for far too long. Maybe it was about time, that he put down the things that he had been waiting for so long.

There are times I wonder what sort of life I would have had if I didn’t have the predisposition to philosophize every thing that I observe. For one thing, things would have been much simpler for me. On the other hand they would have also been one of those lives which I see being lived by everyone I know. It shouldn’t be mistaken in any form that I am somewhere and somehow better at living my life, than my peers. All that’s known to me is that, I have spent some time, quite a lot of time actually, scratching at the surface of what it is meant to have a life. The more important question, that keeps coming and stays unanswered, is what is life anyway?

There are quite a few things which I have come across during my epiphanies. The most recent one being that of ‘wait’. I realized that I have spent more than half of my life, waiting for something to happen. And I am not talking about the proverbial wait in which you are lazy and sit down & wait for the opportunity to come and knock at your door. That’s easy to identify as indolence and even easier to criticize. I was more concerned about the punctures in the memories that I have. Punctures, which were left by waiting for something or (more often) for someone.

When I was in 5th grade, the crazy thing among my classmates was playing with sports cards. We didn’t have baseball cards, because no one really knew about baseball in India, back then. We had WWE and Cricket, instead.

In my middle school, a deck of cards was a contraband. So, I proposed, that we make our own cards. Mind you, the only loss that we were worried about was the financial loss. So, we would just create copies of the cards, and would play with it. If we got caught, we lost one deck, which cost us nothing more than a dozen sheets from our homework notebook and our parents won’t have the chance the chastize us about losing things in the school.

I would wait and wait, for a deck to be finished. I would industriously copy the statistics, even tiny little details to the cards. There were of course, daredevils who would play with the originals. I had a hard time attracting students to play with my hand-made cards. And that’s when I first started waiting.

I would wait for the recess. And when the recess came, I would wait for the recess to end, so that I can slip the deck back to the safety. After that, I would wait for the school day to end, so that I can go and play with my original cards. And when I was at house, I would wait for the school day to start, so that I could introduce my latest deck of copied cards to the everyone. And it went on.

After I ambled my way into adolescent, I would wait for the end of the school to end, so that I could steal a ride beside my crush. It was the wait for her to accidentally catch her in the cycle stand and stutter a ‘hi’. It was the wait, for her to speak something along the ride. The wait for something to come to my mind which I would say to her, without coming out as a complete fool. There was the wait for the final turn on the road to come, where we would both go our sperate ways and then there was the wait for the next day.

When I was in college, I waited for the reply of the well-crafted message that I had sent her(a different one and of course, a crush-er!). When I would see her online, I would wait for the her to send a ‘hi’, only to give in to sending ‘hi’, first. The same waits in the conversations, in which I had no idea what to do. And I waited for the day, when I would know what exactly I had to say.

And then there were waits here and there. The wait for the last day of the deadline to work on that assignment; the wait for the semester to be over and then the wait for the next semester to begin. Wait for someone to show up, after she said she would, an hour before. Wait for everyone and everything.

With so much of everything spent in waiting, I cannot help but wonder, how I had been so wrong. I have read quotes (with pictures, no less!), that in one way or the other say how we should live in the present and not care about the future. Well, it doesn’t work out for me. There are so many things which come and go through life, the one thing that really waits for me is the prospect of waiting for the next thing. Maybe that’s what I have been doing wrong, to wait for the things. Maybe that’s the lynchpin which would unleash all the good things in my life. Maybe and maybe, I just have to stop waiting.