Don’t hate wait

I once recommended a restaurant to a friend wanting to impress his date.  On the night of the event, I was the recipient of an irate phone call.

“This better be worth it,” growled my friend as the maitre d’ showed him to their table. “We booked in advance, but they made us wait almost an hour!”

Growly then proceeded to make it sound like the wait was a hellish inconvenience. Now I was under pressure. Maybe what I hyped as the best lobster in the world would just taste like chicken. I could not let him pin his evening’s failure on me.

“Wait, I don’t get it,” I suddenly realized. “You are supposed to be there on a date, so what does it matter if you had to spend an hour together before you ate?”

He did not have to answer me. The fact that he was calling me this early into his evening was already an indication. I could already conclude that he did not like who he was with. The key piece of evidence was that he minded the wait.

“That bad, huh?” I chuckled at Growly. “I’m sorry you hate this blind date, but you can still make it fun for you.”

“It will be fun when this is all over,” Growly growls, “but right now all I can do is wait for the food we ordered, wait for her to eat it, and then wait for a cab to take her away so I can go to a strip club.”

That’s a lot of waiting, and my friend isn’t very good at that.

The Super Secret Law of Bad Company Time. You can’t have a good time if you don’t like who you are with. (If you are alone and bored, can you guess who doesn’t like you?)

Hating the wait is a product of not liking where we are and who we are with. The alternative is to look forward to whatever should be next — so much so that we attempt to force ourselves into the future. That can’t be easy at all.

Impatience — the choice to focus on the future instead of the Now we are presently in — sends out an invitation to Frustration.  We tell Time to “Go faster!” and then sit there while it does not.  My friend prays to all the forces of the universe to “make this date more interesting,” and then gives me an angry phone call when the universe lets him down.

Patience is a choice to embrace where we are and what is happening. In the absence of an interesting companion, I find that there are still many ways to enjoy a waiting situation.

Play. I like to make up silly little games and challenge myself. How long can I hold my breath? Can I zone in on a specific conversation happening across the room? Can I memorize the items on this menu?

Books. Every early arrival — be it at a doctor’s office or the airport — is an opportunity to catch up on my reading. I have a book with me as a standby at all times.

People. Unless I am waiting in a dark alley for some contraband, there is a good chance that I will have some people around.  Watching them can be extremely entertaining. I can sit in a bus stuck in traffic and imagine fantastic stories about how that passenger got his deformed arm — and if his buddies call him “T-Rex.”

Talking. This is a stretch for me, because I am generally a very private person, but I’ve found that as long as I make everything up as I go along, I can have an entertaining conversation with a complete stranger fill up my waiting time. I can make a new friend, and my new friend can go home and tell his wife how he met the man who invented Post-Its at the bank. (And his wife would never believe him, because she knows for a fact that the lanky woman from Friends did that.)

Music. I can put my headphones on and use this waiting time as an opportunity to just listen. To actually hear the music, and not just use it as background. I may notice a violin that I never really heard before, or realize that I’ve been dancing to a song that was actually about perspiration oozing from a man’s private parts.

Scenery. I like to use idle time to appreciate. It could be the sky, or the grain on the wooden coffee table. I can take the scenery a step or two further by…

Walking. With my headphones on I can combine walking around with music, people, and scenery. I play my music loud enough so that it is being fed directly into my brain, and I make my eyes the camera. I produce, direct, and watch my very own music video.

Snoozing. Again, unless I am in a dark alley or somewhere unsecure, I can always catch up on my ZZZs while I wait. My compensation for my insomnia has been to quit driving and instead travel by taking long rides in airconditioned busses where I lose nothing by snoozing.

Houston’s Super Secret Law and The Dumb Waiter: If I merely let moments pass until the moment I want arrives, then I will have lived for only that one moment in time.

Things are happening right now where I am, so instead of looking for ways to merely pass the time until my moment arrives, I can make sure I enjoy the moments as they pass.

I have found that doing this keeps me excited. I find reasons to arrive early. I never mind when you are late. I begin to look forward to waiting time. I find myself smiling when I hear the announcement that my flight has just been delayed for another four hours.

How can I hate when I can wait?