Thursday, April 17, 2014

Wait a minute

It's all about waiting. 

I've put it in writing for all to see.

Someone once said "Life is what happens when you're making other plans." I can see that. I can also see people walking about, smoking their cigarettes, sipping pops. Filling up gas cans, making small talk, setting their gum on the dashboard: everybody's getting ready. 

You see, no one's really "there" yet, but they're gonna be--Tolkien's "last deep breath before the plunge..."  A drama professor once said "great drama shows the highlights; no one wants to watch the in between moments". True. Even actors wait for their cues....and there it is: Life doesn't grind us, waiting does. 

Not everybody lives. Not everybody gains. Not everybody loses. Not everybody enjoys. Not everybody dreads, desires, cheats, assails, curses, prays or preys.  But everybody--and this is everybody--waits.

We wait for life to happen. We wait for love. We wait for sports matchups. We wait for justice, we wait for convergence, revelations, we wait for a diagnosis, we wait for Jesus. We wait to be born. 

I'm not going to the next logical thought here: you'll have to wait.

It carries the wisdom of verisimilitude. Doesn't matter what we wait for, or for how long. We're all stuck in that syrup-slow aquarium of anticipation, and it links our tired lives through its timeless tendrils of tedium. Stan Lee would be proud of that one!

Waiting drives us crazy. It endows the value of the main course. It's the Everything, But....

Every emotion exists in "wait", every adjective. Every quantity is calculated in "wait". 

"Wait" trumps everything but Time. Even for anything that happens, however the immediacy, there still exists an element of "wait". Waiting is the ultimate substance in the universe.

Great thinkers and apologists will suddenly sit up and try to be recognized. They'll no doubt slip on the dusty specs of knowledge and place their caps of academia here, and simply ask: "you've defined the condition, now what's the question...?"

Well, then, let's bring out the questions:

Can "wait" become a "do"? No, that's lame: I'm trying to energize a passive verb. 

Can "wait" be gussied-up? Glamorized? Made more enjoyable?  No, muzak's got that cornered.

Since it's ever-present, can "wait" be ignored like the cute 20-something with a brand new selfie?

It's something we all have to deal with, certainly, so can we choose to steal its power? Harness its intimidating presence? I'm not presumptuous enough to tame and make it my ally, much less my friend: waiting knows me all too well. But there might be hope in siphoning this relentless resource.

Waiting can work for us. Wait can wait on us. Make t-shirts: Ween Wait. We can willfully woo wait!

Love waiting. 

Fill it love, endow it with the energy of action. 

Any action. 

Never let a wait go to waste.



No comments:

Post a Comment