Patience, many say, is the key to success in life. That good things happen to those who wait. Or that the best things are reserved for the last. The dictionary meaning of patience is “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, problems, or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious”.
Patience though doesn’t make it by itself if she isn't accompanied by her close cousin perseverance, which means — “ persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success”. Patience and perseverance are abstract nouns and in their adjective form necessary qualities in a successful man. At the same time, entangled with the performance or the embodiment of these two nouns is a verb — waiting. If we were to imagine patience and perseverance to be two sets of parallel lines crossing each other at right angles like in a square or a rectangle, they automatically create a space, which is far larger in expanse than either of the lines. And, that space is ‘waiting’.
If patience and perseverance are virtues that we are either predisposed to embody or wilfully cultivate over a period of time, waiting is the psychological clock that keeps ticking while we are putting into practice two of the most coveted attitudes of successful people. Waiting is always in the background, lurking in the shadows and manifests sometimes as anxiety or paralysis, at other times isolation and yet at other times failure. Waiting is eternal while success and happiness are elusive. The ever-evolving human species is doomed to wait for things to get better, to find cures for incurable diseases, to invent or discover imperishable resources in order to run this material world.
We spend a humongous chunk of our life span simply waiting — for the right job or the right partner — the two of the most crucial waits of our lifetime. Ad agencies and inspirational speeches never tire of reminding you “it was worth the wait, after all” — to make us feel good about the events that seem so mundane and unsatisfactory once they have occurred.
During my childhood, whenever a family trip was planned in advance and I came to know about it, I would stop all activities. I couldn’t for a moment think about anything else other than the day when we start the trip. I would stop studying altogether. Refuse to do anything productive. Preparatory activities and daydreaming about the trip would engulf me. As a result, the real event always turned out to be underwhelming. The build-up, the wait, the layers of imagination and meaning that were added to a not-so-momentous event by a child was far more entertaining than the actual execution.
Adult life hardly offers you such escapes. We are so well-versed with reality as adults that flights of fantasy don't seem to work for us any longer. Then how do you wait when absolutely nothing of significance is happening in your life — no promotion, no marriage, no impending doom, no childbirth. By consuming, eating and buying. Just the other day, when my colleague and I were at the grocery store, he was fretting over which brand of rice to buy. Intolerant of such fastidiousness, I simply walked up to the next aisle and bought a bunch of cosmetics that I didn't really need. At that point, the best distraction was to lose myself in the world of anti-ageing creams and imagine a ten year younger version of me, if I applied them.
I am probably not the only one who resorts to the worst kind of consumerist behaviour to deal with the blah moments of our life — which is most of our life while we wait for that ultimate thing we feel would elevate our human experience, which would free us from feeling stuck in a never-ending loop of waking, eating, doing our chores, and sleeping. But how does one wait in a healthy way? In a way that doesn't deplete our bank balance or make us overweight and diseased, or alcoholic. Most great men have had their afflictions, their life’s mission took a toll on them. Probably, there are no non-destructive ways of waiting.
Probably, true happiness belongs to one who has surrendered to the fact that there is nothing to wait for. One who doesn’t look forward to anything grand. One who can revel in the beauty of nature. One who knows that she doesn't have to wait to lose the extra weight to look for love, or get that degree to feel worthy. Waiting becomes irrelevant the moment we tune out of our mind, and tune in to our surroundings. When the internal noise learns to match the external rhythm, the tyranny of waiting ends.
(The writer is a mental health and behavioural sciences columnist, conducts art therapy workshops and provides personality development sessions for young adults. She can be found as @the_millennial_pilgrim on Instagram and Twitter.)
