Waiting
We spend a big part of our lives waiting. We wait for the train, in line at Starbucks, for a table at a restaurant and at a red light before we cross the street. We also wait to have the money to live the life we want to live, to go after what we want in life because we feel we are not ready, to put ourselves out there because we don’t feel good about ourselves, for the right moment to talk to a person we are interested in and we wait to be honest with people around us because we do not want to hurt them.
I hate waiting! Waiting for the train alone makes me sometimes so mad that I have steam coming out of my ears. I connect this directly to the therapy I did. It opened me up to feel things again. I used to be very shut down emotionally, all I had was my head. My whole life was a thought process. I would think about it but I would not feel it. That has changed dramatically. Today I feel very intensely. That his very positive but also means that I get very angry sometimes.
To me anger is a positive thing and it is natural. If I have to wait 25 minuets for a train while I am already running behind meeting a friend it is natural that I am not happy about that. But what are we taught to do? We are taught to suppress it, to bottle it up and to push it away. But is that a solution? Not really because now we carry the anger around with us and most likely it will bubble up and hit the wrong person.
Anger never goes bad. Maybe we are still angry because we felt mistreated by our parents as children. We were not allowed to express it since we could not talk to them honestly because we depended on their support. Today we might lash out on our partner based on being angry about how we were treated decades ago.
When I get angry today I let the anger take its course right away. I get really angry and then the anger goes away and I am good again. In this case nothing is bottled up and I do not lash out at people who do not deserve that treatment.
But back to what I wanted to talk about today. The first part of my waiting list will never go away. We will always have to wait for the train, in line at Starbucks and so on. But what about the second part? Do we have the time to wait until we have the money to live the life we want to live? Do we have the time to wait to go after what we want in life? When will we feel good enough about ourselves? Is there a perfect moment to talk to somebody we are interested in? Should we wait to be honest with people?
One of my favorite stories about this theme is when a friend of my sister told her what he really wanted in life. He wanted to live on a farm in the southern part of Germany. He was selling insurances for a big insurance company, living and working in New York City. “This is my last year, I recently wanted to quit but they threw so much money at me to make me stay that I wasn’t able to refuse it.” They had this conversation on a weekend. A few days later he went to work early in the morning. His office was high up the World Trade Center and the date was September 11th 2001. He would never live on a farm in Bavaria.
The time is always now. I personally do not feel that I have time to waist and I learned over the years that if you want something in life you have to go and get it. Karma is action. Waiting does not change anything. All it does is to repeat the past. Going for what we want in life, living the life we want to live, to put ourselves out there, to talk to people we are interested in and to always be honest will change our lives. We sometimes might think we will live forever but life at least in this body is limited. If we do not go for what we want right now we might not get the opportunity to do it later.
"Waiting" Williamsburg/Brooklyn/Grand Street Stop on the G train 04-13-08 at 01:08 PM
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