Waiters, by the mere connotation of their professional discipline (and I mean, real discipline), could be the most bored-stiff workers alive. Heck, they are being paid to wait as customers pick their choices, wait while they gorge, wait for extra orders, wait for the "bill" gesture, wait for the tip, and wait for another flock of clients to trickle in. They surely could hardly wait the waiting.
Bored waiters or just plain uninitiated strandees,waiting is indeed an extraneous effort without. Nothing compares the ambivalent feeling of being stranded in a purgatory between here and there, of being "almost at it but not quite". You are made to watch pots that seemingly never boil and guard clocks that tick eternal. When you are forced to wait, seconds seem to pass at a snail's pace. It's like dead spaces between beats, a lingering pause in a time lag.
In restlessly anticipating for tomorrow, you often end up emptied and wallowing in yawning gaps -- waiting periods that force you to loiter and fidget in the present time tied to a future tense. Stuck in the "tomorrow today" (and for how long, you don't know),you are made to wait patiently for the next available escape to the future.
Waiting is supposed to be a breathing space. But no, far from enjoying the lull, you feel frustrated, impatient, jittery. Marooned and left without options, you warm the bench and twiddle your thumbs and count the stars. You verify your timepiece and are annoyed to find them still ticking like eternity. Indeed, one of your worst fears is to sulk behind as humanity rushes through a seemingly feverish race against time.
You know that time flows in a continuous stream, 24 hours a day, rain or shine, millennial time bombs and all. There are those who believe that time reels off in a cycle, where procrastination is nothing but an temporary chronological wastage whose lost chances could be recouped later as time’s circular motion goes back on and on.
But there are more of those who believe that time is a linear, run-away stream of opportunities, like a chance for a one-way trip which is lost forever once foregone. Time's passing is unrepentantly ephemeral that once a chance becomes a thing of the past, it can never be recovered some other time. No such things as time machines, rewinding and replays, returns of the comeback, whatsoever.
That's why most of us feel foolish and squandered when we are made to wait, more so if in vain. We are trapped in an invisible cobweb of our own making, left hanging in mid-air and stuck in suspended animation.
Perhaps the best way to get past of this lingering vacuity is to break free from the chains of the seeming constancy of an impending future, and suck and relish the fertile possibilities of the present.
You just have to say to yourself, "No, the plane is not leaving in 5 hours, it will leave after 5 hours." Or say, "I will not be seeing her now, I will see her later." And say, "I will not wait and see, I will cross the bridge when I get there."
Waiting ought not to be a prelude to the future. If anything, it should be an overture to the past. Spare yourself from the tyranny of imminence and the allure of the forthcoming.
Bask and dawdle in the present. Make every moment last -- right now. Give your future a past to remember.