Why wait

Tuongvan Le
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

It’s 5 pm in Ho Chi Minh City. The red light is counting down by seconds. 45, 44, 43,… Everyone seems to be in a hurry. Tick tock. Tick tock. Each second a crowd of motorbikes moves by a few centimeters to be closer to the stop line on the street. Cm by cm. Until the red light hits close to zero, then everyone rushes forward.

Source: Pixabay

To live is to make use of every second, to rush against time, to not wait, and to maximize each day.

If you are someone who has been following my life within the past 4 years of college, you probably can tell that this is one of my dominant life philosophy. My everyday schedule is usually packed from 8 AM until midnight. I tend to prefer efficiency and would always carry my backpack around everywhere so I can pull out my laptop or books to read or work on something if there is a free chunk of time, like what I’m about to do right now — pulling out a notebook from my backpack to write down my random thoughts while waiting for the plane to take off.

I am a fan of “Wait But Why,” a really interesting website full of thought-provoking articles visualizing how time is so limited and highlights the urgency of making the most of our time with friends and family and everyone because life is so short before we know it ends.

I’m guilty of starting most of my notes/letters/mails to people with reference to time. The concept of time has been so dominant from the time I wake up to the moment I fall asleep while working on something. I am a product of the 21st century’s fast-paced lifestyle.

If there is a new lesson that I have had the opportunity to learn this summer, it is the significance of waiting and the joy of having something valuable to wait for. To learn how to wait is essential to growing up, I think. I believe that an important part of growing up is to have one’s own judgment and discrimination of what is valuable and what is not. To realize that there are people and things in life that are worth the time waiting for is part of growing up. People and things are valuable because they are so rare to find and they enrich your life so tremendously that they make all the hours, days, and months of waiting worth it.

Source: Pixabay

Why should we wait? Should we only wait if know the end results are worth it? If time is so valuable and irreversible, then when do we feel okay sharing it with someone or giving it away forever? I’m not saying that we should waste time waiting for everything indiscriminately. Rather I want to highlight the importance of learning how to wait in some special circumstances.

Everything has its own value and moment. It’s like an entrepreneur knows it’s time to turn an idea into a startup when he spends most of his time thinking and working on the idea passionately everyday. Perhaps it’s a similar situation when we decide what is worth waiting for — if it’s important enough to you, then you know you will find joy and value in waiting. You are willing to make the impossible, possible.

There are end results in life that would make waiting NOT meaningless and wasteful, the same way our parents patiently raise us up and are ready to accept and forgive our childish mistakes and misbehavior to then one day they can see us grow up as independent, happy adults. Though time only moves forward and hence life goes on without waiting, waiting makes us more aware of time and become more appreciative of it. Time is valuable when we see value in spending it. Perhaps waiting can be another way of spending time. And for special people and moments in life, they make waiting worth it.

June 10th, 2017

Written by

Harvard ’17 | Strategy & Data @ Opendoor | ex-Bain, Morgan Stanley | Passionate about writing, education, community empowerment | www.tuongvanle.me

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