The Life of Wait
A second life, behind the seconds’ hand
The park was empty, and the air was moist with the morning dew. That wasn’t a much of a surprise at 5.07 am.
It’s fascinating to fantasize about the sort of life I’d have had if I lacked the predisposition to philosophize everything that I observe. For one thing, things would have been much simpler. On the other hand, it would’ve been one of those lives that I see being lived by everyone whom I hate. It shouldn’t be mistaken that I’m somewhere or 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 the surface of what it is meant to have a life. The more important question, that keeps coming and stays unanswered — what is life anyway?
The most recent of my epiphanies was about ‘wait’. I realized that I’ve spent more than half my life, waiting for something to happen. And I’m not talking about the proverbial wait in which you wait for an opportunity to come and knock at your door. It’s easy to classify that kind of ‘wait’ as indolence and even easier to criticize it. I am more concerned about the punctures in my memories. 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 celebrity cards. In India, we’ve cricket cards and WWE cards; with all the statistics that get outdated the minute the card is printed. A deck of cards was a contraband in the school. So, I proposed, that we make our own cards. Everyone was worried about was the financial loss, that someone would incur by the seizure of this contraband.
So, I suggested we would copy the statistics on the cards, to card-sized pieces of paper. 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 to chastise us about losing things in the school. Everything was sorted. Except that, everyone was lazy! No one wanted to copy the weight, height, and biceps of The Undertaker.
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’d wait for one deck of card to be finished. I’d 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 my safety. After that, I’d wait for the day to end so that I can go and play with my original cards. And when I was at the 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.
When I ambled into adolescence, I’d wait to accidentally run into her and stutter a ‘hi’. The wait, for coming up with something to say which would not make a complete fool out of me. There was the wait for that intersection where we would both go our opposite 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. When I would see her online, I’d wait for her to send a ‘hi’, only to give in to the temptation of being the 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 finals 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’d 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. With so many things that come and go through life, the one thing that really waits for me is the prospect of waiting for the next thing.
Maybe taking out that ‘wait’ linchpin will unleash all the good things in my life. Maybe but maybe, I’ll have to stop waiting. But the thing is, I’ll have to wait, to see how that works out!
