Many of us are waiting in life,
Waiting for something,
Either waiting for the weekend to come,
Waiting for the doctor's result to come,
Waiting for whatever is painful to pass through us,
Waiting for something pleasant to happen,
Waiting for our soulmate,
Waiting to find a new job,
And if we don't have a reason to wait,
We are just waiting for something.
I remember when I was a kid,
We used to get our school results in mail,
And so there was probably two months between the end of our exams and one and a half month or so,
Between the end of the exam and when we expected the result to come.
And as an overachiever I was,
That I was,
I wanted to know right away what had happened so that I can relax,
Enjoy my summer break.
So I used to wake up and have this thought cross my mind almost every day,
How many more days for the result?
How many more days?
How many more days?
So although I was living my life,
I was waiting,
Waiting to find out.
So at a deeper level,
I had put my life on pause.
Of course,
Nobody knew that except me,
Not that I consciously knew what I was doing,
But I recognized that I was putting my life on pause.
And the nature of this waiting is very restrictive.
As I mentioned,
Everything seems to be on pause.
You don't feel like starting anything new,
Doing anything that is pleasant as well.
Our mind,
Our energy seems to be blocked until this thing happens.
And if some of us are impatient,
We will make something negative happen just so that we are relieved of this tension,
Tension in our bodies and minds of waiting.
Some things are too painful to wait.
So even though there is a good chance something good might happen,
We make something bad happen.
I remember my brother,
When he was trying to get into engineering school,
The process at that time,
23 years ago in India,
Was that you have to stand in line and based on your rank in the entire district,
You will be called with a given set of options and you have to choose an engineering school.
And some days it goes throughout the night.
So he waited until 1 a.
M.
And then just left,
Came back home.
He didn't want to wait,
So he never got into engineering school.
So he decided to pursue something else only because he couldn't wait or he couldn't handle the wait.
So we are either waiting and when the pressure of waiting is too much,
We want to release the pressure.
It's not the release through wisdom,
But a release through impatience.
And once we feel a little better,
We start waiting again.
I'm just waiting to see what happens.
That's what we tell our friends.
Sometimes the wait is few days,
Sometimes weeks,
Sometimes it's years.
After a certain point,
We don't even know what we are waiting for.
Even after what we thought we were waiting for,
We already got it.
And this waiting is very personal,
Very intimate.
Nobody talks about it other than the obvious waiting that I was talking about.
But this deep-rooted waiting,
Waiting for something good to happen or waiting for something to happen.
In the process,
We stop having fun.
It's just another way of pausing our life.
But that's a very conceptual pausing of life.
It happens only in our minds.
In reality,
Everything is happening.
We are waking up,
We are eating,
We are going about our day.
But in our minds,
We have paused life.
Netflix or Instagram or YouTube or TikTok,
That becomes our constant companion to get through this wait.
Once in a while,
Reluctantly,
We'll go out with some of our friends.
You might be thinking,
What's so special about this waiting?
What's wrong in this waiting?
Why is it that we are talking about this waiting for such a long time?
What happens when we are waiting is nothing happens.
Life seems to have become stuck.
Our health is going downhill.
Our mind is in tension.
Our habits are creating havoc.
We're merely surviving,
Getting through the day,
Hoping for tomorrow to bring something,
Some spark,
Some savior,
Some knight in shining armor.
But we are too afraid to go out in the sun.
And even if we are going to work,
We can't handle the sun.
We wear sunglasses and step out.
And for some of us,
We have lived this life for so many years that life stops being fun.
The answer to every different thing in our life is no.
Do you want to go here?
No.
Do you want to do this?
No,
No,
No.
I don't think I can make it.
You guys carry on.
I'll stay in.
And if we have a reason to go out,
Our eyes are constantly trying to find that thing that we are looking for.
Especially when it comes to relationships,
Opportunities for business,
Or a plain simple finding friends in our life.
Our eyes are just scanning the room.
We are preoccupied with what we are waiting or looking for,
Fixated on this one thing.
Sometimes we're just waiting for kids to grow up.
Sometimes we are waiting for us to retire,
For the house to be paid off.
Just waiting,
Waiting,
Waiting.
But life is not waiting.
We think the life is waiting.
But that thinking is just out of touch from reality.
I heard someone ask this profound question,
Although it was in the context of business.
But it applies so beautifully in our everyday life as well.
The question was,
What are you doing while you are waiting?
What are you doing?
Are you on pause?
Or are you having fun?
Are you learning?
Are you growing?
Are you laughing?
But I don't feel like it.
If that's your response,
Sometimes we have to do things that we don't feel like.
Feelings have their momentum.
The longer you stay in bed,
The longer you feel like staying in bed.
The longer you stay at home,
The longer you feel like staying at home.
Inertia kicks in.
If you ask this question to yourself,
What are you doing while you are waiting?
For a soulmate for this exam result to come.
For a doctor's report to come.
For kids to leave the house.
For you to retire.
What are you doing while you are waiting?
There might be a dozen reasons to pause your life.
Can you find at least one to start living?
To step out,
Talk to new people.
Go for a run.
Go for a walk.
Go to the gym.
Declutter your house.
Rearrange your house.
Fix and organize your house.
Freshen it up.
I'm not asking you to stop waiting.
But can we wait without waiting?
Can we wait without pausing?
Can we wait while we live?
When we plant something in our garden,
We wanted to see it grow.
But growth happens when we are not looking.
When you come out the next morning,
You'll find a little bud.
You'll find the blossom.
You'll find something that will show you that it's growing.
But if you insist to see it grow,
You will keep waiting.
And while you are waiting,
You might even miss the growth.
And think about how surprised,
How satisfying it is to be surprised.
Oh yeah,
Today there's a bud.
So exciting.
Although you were waiting for it to blossom,
But yet it was surprise.
Same thing could happen in our life while we are waiting,
For whatever reason we are waiting.
Can we take care of ourselves?
Can we build something?
Can we have fun?
When whatever needs to happen,
When it does happen,
It can be a surprise.
This can prevent dullness from entering our life,
Inertia from taking over our life,
From no becoming the standard operating procedure in our life.
The micro experience of this kind of waiting happens throughout the day.
What's the first thing you do when you are stopped at a light?
You check your phone.
When you're waiting in line at the grocery store,
Check your phone.
When you're waiting for your flight,
Check your phone.
Because we think there is nothing important in life between us reaching the airport and us getting into the flight.
That's unwanted life that we are trying to while away.
The only good thing about standing in line while checking out our groceries is checking out our groceries.
So we check out mentally into our phones,
Into our dream worlds because somewhere deep down we think life is one event to another event and everything in between is just disposable.
Life is about giving an exam and getting a report card.
In between,
Life is just meant to be paused,
To be distracted,
To be passed.
Can we do something productive while we wait?
Can we live while we wait?
No matter how bad things are,
No matter how bad things might be,
Can we find a reason to celebrate,
To go out,
To invite people home?
It's not that pausing our life is making things go away.
Staying inside the house is not alleviating our pain in any way.
Instead of checking out and being lost in Netflix and other TV shows,
Maybe we can be a little present and intentional.
Without disrespecting what is going on,
We can still choose to do something productive.
Why not?
Thank you.
