In a society as fast paced and as high-tech as ours, we have adapted to the ease of pressing a button and having a package arrive at our door. Before the age of Amazon, we would be comfortable waiting one or two weeks for an item to arrive. Now, if a package takes an extra 24 hours to arrive, it makes our heads swirl. Regardless of how long it takes for something to arrive on our front porch, I can state with full certainty that human beings hate waiting. With that being said, the concept of instant gratification determines our attitudes towards not only work and school, but our daily lives.
Before coming to school this semester, I was having a candid conversation with my mother regarding some anxiety about returning to school. Nothing was inherently wrong; I was excited to live with my best friends, take some exciting classes, and get a glimpse of normal campus life. I was not anxious about anything tangible- I was anxious about the uncertainty of the near future.
I had always hated waiting- until I learned to soak it in. There’s a page in “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” that sums up this feeling entirely, “The Waiting Place”. At each chapter in our lives, we are waiting for the next milestone to happen just so we can move on to the next. The waiting period between finding your dream career path or your ideal partner is a daunting yet beautiful process. I’ve learned to be okay with waiting for the right opportunities and people to fall into my life. Let’s just say that I’m okay if my package of new clothes gets delayed a few days in the mail.
Success is slow. You are not going to achieve your wildest dreams overnight. Instead, it takes persistence, self awareness, and intrinsic motivation in order to reach your best self. In my own life, I have struggled with waiting for life to get “good”. During the peak of the pandemic, I was wasting my energy dwelling on when life would get back to “normal”. When would I finally get to hug my grandparents or see my friends? When would I be able to attend in-person class at Penn State? Although these feelings were valid, I realize now that I should have taken that time in my life, my last fleeting moments of high school, to be in the present.
When you become comfortable with yourself and your journey in life, you are slowly conquering the fear of waiting. You will never have this version of yourself again- just slow down and take it in.
Hi Madelyn,
I loved your blog and it made me think of the common saying of stopping to smell the roses. Ferris Bueller will tell you that “life moves pretty fast” and we don’t stop to look around once in a while [we] might miss it. ” I think that we can spend our whole lives waiting for the next milestone like you were saying, and we might miss our lives like that. There will always be something else, and again, like you said, success is slow. Your mentality of living the waiting place is really meaningful and I think we can all learn from it.
I can’t say that I am not guilty of ordering things on Amazon that I easily could have picked up at a store (and getting annoyed when the package does not deliver the same day as the estimated date is), I definitely agree with you. I recognize that my patience runs thin and I am not nearly as patient as I wish I was, but I also believe that what you said is true, in regards to our generation loathing waiting. It is simply the outcome of our fast paced society. While technology has lead to greater innovations to make life easier and make information easier to distribute, it has its caveats because human attention span is now shorter and it is difficult to truly digest everything. At a certain point—as I remember conversing with my English professor about—it has even made humans numb and apathetic to a degree (just what I have observed about human patience and waiting).
Anyways, you are completely right that success is slow. I love how you wrote that ‘When you become comfortable with yourself and your journey in life, you are slowly conquering the fear of waiting.’. That really resonated with me. I also relate to you in that I also wait for life to get good. But, good is everywhere. As cheesy as it sounds, if you spend your time waiting for things to get better, you might just miss out on the things in your life that are already great. I have to remind myself that I am probably where I wanted to be in the past, and be grateful for that. Otherwise, if I keep chasing or waiting for better things, I will never be satisfied with my current success and journey.
I also REALLY love how you connected your blog to a childhood favorite. Thank you for your post, and reminding me to take it in. I needed that this week after being so perpetually busy.