• Home

The Price Of Waiting

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

I am just tempted to ride off right now, into the sunset, into the next life whatever…this is depressing and not even because I am doing something wrong or because I broke someone’s heart. This waiting is murder and I am just tempted to stop waiting.

Aren’t we waiting all our lives? For love, a promotion, marriage, death? What’s the big deal about waiting? I’m sure there’s a statistic about how much time we spend waiting every day and I don’t think it would be a fun number to find out what portion of the average life is spent waiting in the limbo between tasks or events. I’m sick of it and I want it to stop.

His mind was several decades away as the words poured out over the telephone line into his headphones. He was thinking about another time, another place when he had been guilty of thinking the same thoughts. He was working very hard to avoid the eyes of the other man in the room. He needed time to be able to word this as succinctly as he could because he knew how hard it was to actually pay attention to anything that is said to ease depression if those words take too long to say. And then he pushed the button.

“Sameena, you sound like you have given this a lot of thought. From listening to you I am tempted to wish I was as young as you sound so that I could learn the confidence you so clearly have. I know that sounds like a strange thing to say but to be able to state so clearly what bothers you is really a sign of clarity and the confidence that comes with it.

Now I wish I had a way to make all this go away for you because I truly believe that any suffering that can be eased in this life has the multiplied effect of easing stress across a world, depending on how small or large that world is. It could be a household, it could be a classroom, boardroom or the Oval Office. Harm that is caused because of greed is a different animal but harm that is caused because of one person’s situation…that anger can be snuffed out by showing the angry man or woman some kindness and understanding.

I am about to share with you a story that’s never been heard by anyone except God. It’s not in my biography, online or anywhere else except in my own mind. It is also the real reason why I wish I had been as confident as you when I was thirty-five. I was confused because life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. I had a wife but I was afraid to have children, hell I was even afraid to have sex because my wife could get pregnant and I didn’t know what I would do to earn the money we would need to raise that child.

On most days my wife understood and on some other days she got impatient with my insecurity and fears. The reason, the sole reason for all this doubt in my mind, this inability to prove to the only person I ever loved how much she meant to me, was the fact that I didn’t know how to break out of this cycle of waiting and hoping that someone would throw me a lifeline and I could be dragged to a shore paved with riches. I postponed my life for seven long years Sameena because I was waiting for someone to come save me. Because I didn’t know that I had the strength in myself to save what was mine.

When I did eventually take the first step that led me to today and this conversation with you I did it out of necessity. You have the luxury of beginning your journey out of choice. Here’s what I’m saying to you Sameena. Don’t let them paint you into a corner and don’t you paint yourself into a corner either. Waiting is inevitable in some situations like outside the delivery room in a hospital but there is not one single reason why you should be waiting for something like a cheque or an acceptance letter.

Giving other people the power over yourself is the acceptance of defeat when you didn’t even know you were in a fight. But you’re in a fight every single day that you are alive. The fight to be recognized, the fight to be loved, the fight for respect and the fight to be one of a small group of the individuals that you aspire to be like. One morning I woke up and an awards show was on TV and I watched them all instead of working. I watched and I rued the fact that I wasn’t one of them. I yearned for that recognition and the glory especially because I thought I was capable of much better than those people on that TV set.

There are things that will happen to you Sameena, whether you want them to or not. Even the dreams you have that will be realized will seem to have not been your dreams at all because you’ve already adopted a new dream. There should be no waiting, only doing. Because at the end of the day, when all is said and done, a person is defined by what they achieve.

If you were to give in to that temptation to die because life isn’t going how you dreamed it, all you will be remembered as, is the girl who killed herself because she didn’t know what to do with all she had.

Let history define the winners and losers Sameena, you just keep on doing what you want to be remembered for.”

The other man in the room hastened to fill the dead air that followed with an exhortation to keep those phone lines occupied because the famous movie director would be taking questions for at least another forty-five minutes. The director in the meantime closed his eyes and offered up a prayer for the girl he had just spoken to, like he had done all those years ago when jealousy at other people’s success had pushed him to consider doing something he didn’t want to be remembered for.

Comments