Waiting

Gun’s Quote-of-the-Week:

“I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.”
-E.V. Lucas

It’s the time of year when kids start to get quite anxious. There is Christmas right around the corner, accompanied with lengthy breaks, new toys and a general lack of responsibility. It’s every college-kid-and-younger’s favorite time of year.

It’s the time of year when people get anxious about the New Year. Perhaps there are reflections on what 2012 had to offer. There is a moment where one looks back on successes and failures and starts to hope that 2013 will offer opportunities for more success, a new job, better grades or perhaps just an excuse to be happy that a disappointing year is about to end and a new one with more promise about to begin.

For so many I talk to right now, they just can’t wait for the year to end. It’s a natural break in people’s lives, and the prospect of a New Year offers them hope. Perhaps they are getting married. Perhaps they a moving somewhere new. Perhaps they are graduating. Perhaps they are starting a new job. Perhaps they just want a clean slate.

You know what a doctor’s waiting room looks like, right? There is a rack of magazines with many different topics, most of which have nothing to do with medicine. My doctor’s waiting room has magazines on trucks, cars and sports. The ladies get to choose from Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and different recipe magazines. There are also the toys set up in the corner for the kids to play with. The waiting room contains a TV playing a national news channel of the office’s inflection.

In other words, the waiting room contains the great adult pacifiers to help remove the anxieties associated with whatever reason why these people came to the doctor’s office in the first place. Nobody wants to wait, but if they have to, they might as well wait with their mind focused on something other than what they are waiting on. It doesn’t just have to be the doctor’s office. Car repair shops have the same thing. So do courthouses.

Life happens in the waiting room, though. Between the phone call and the appointment, the test and the grade, the engagement and the wedding, the first Advent Candle and Christmas Day, life happens. It is perhaps in these moments, those times when we can disguise our anxieties and flush-out our impatience with distractions, which best define how the moment we are waiting for will turn out. We may be tempted to hibernate through our waiting or we may be strengthened by it, learn patience by it and thus prepare ourselves more fully for it. We can choose to be alive while we wait, or we may choose to bunker down like the roses and the insects, not reemerging until the light of spring beckons our coming out of the mud where they live for the winter.

So, while waiting sucks, take it. Live it. Go with it. But whatever it is you do, don’t sit in the mud. There’s a lot of life to live above the surface.

…and that’s why it’s a Gun’s Quote!