Hang on – is it worth the wait?

By Lesley Hart

Published:

THEY say all good things come to those who wait, but that’s just a trick to keep you waiting. The truth is, time waits for no man, and therefore no man should wait while time marches mercilessly on.

Women get a slightly better deal time-wise because we live longer and take longer to get ready.

Nevertheless, we none of us have endless time to spare – far from it. Time is precious – often more precious than the things we spend time waiting for.

That’s why, by the time we get those things, they seldom seem worth the wait.

If you’re waiting for stuff to happen, it’s very hard to seize the day or live for the moment – which, given the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the shortness of life, is precisely what we should be doing at all times.

Waiting is a standby mode where you’re not quite on, and not quite off, but on hold. Being on hold on the phone is especially wasteful as it costs you both time and money – although some would say “time is money”, but I would say it’s worth much more than that.

You may, by this stage in the column, be wondering what I am waiting for. The answer is: too many things at once.

These include the results of an audition (if I find out at all. Usually when actors don’t get a part, we just have to guess when to give up the ghost – which is a bummer) – and to hear back from several different people about various writing projects, which can take any amount of time and often requires regular prompting – which is a pain. I am also waiting for freelance fees to come through, which can be hard to time and therefore nearly impossible to bank on.

In the course of all this waiting, I have filled my time and distracted my brain with various displacement activities, some of which have led to more waiting – you plant new seeds, you have to wait to see how they’ll grow (metaphorically speaking – I haven’t the patience for gardening).

If you are in the driving seat, waiting is sometimes quite exciting – indeed, the thrill of the chase is often more exciting than the prize. It’s when you’re powerless to do anything but watch the clock tick by that waiting starts to drive you slowly mad. That’s why car chases are thrilling but traffic jams are soul-crushing torture.

NO MATTER how much I try to distract myself and get on with other things, parts of me persist in dwelling on all the things I’m waiting for, and trying to forget.

My brain may be engaged in a crossword, my legs in cycling, my mouth in eating and drinking, but my stomach is screaming “Hurry up!” and doing acrobatics all day long, and in my sleep.

Admittedly, I’m a very impatient person. This may not make me virtuous or saintly, but I’m not prepared to waste a single second more than is absolutely necessary waiting for any godforsaken thing.

Anyway, like “All good things come to those who wait”, the sayings, “Patience is a virtue” and “Patience of a saint”, were merely coined to fool us into waiting even longer.

To the existential question, “Why are we waiting?”, I can offer no coherent reason. It persistently confounds me, especially since there are so many things we could, and should, be doing with our precious time. The humorist, Guy Browning, suggests it is “because somebody is keeping you waiting and the reason they’re doing that is because whatever else they’re currently doing just can’t wait”.

OF ALL the things to wait for, the one that I particularly hate is people who are late. Five minutes is forgivable, 10 at a stretch, but any more than that and you are robbing me of my precious time and spending it on yourself – you swine.

Queuing is another curse. Where possible, I’ll take any alternative to standing around and inching slowly forward towards something that is almost certainly not worth waiting two-and-a-half hours in the rain for.

What baffles me is how willing most Brits are to join the longest queue, and why they don’t bother to try to find a shorter one, say, in the next aisle at the supermarket, or another check-in desk at the airport, or another cash machine just around the corner.

I’ll never understand why thousands queue up, lemming-like, for taxis outside Glasgow Central Station at Hogmanay, waiting hours in the freezing cold to get home.

Even the greatest night out ever would be utterly spoiled by that ordeal. Yet year in, year out, the queues snake round the corner all night long.

As games go, you’d be hard pushed to find one more dull or demoralising than the “Waiting Game”.

The win or lose element of this dire sport seems simply to depend on whether you can wait long enough for something without losing all your marbles and the will to live in the process.

In Monopoly, you get bankrupted of money; in the Waiting Game, you lose inordinate amounts of time, will, and marbles.

Waiting for something that is likely to happen can be bad enough, but waiting in vain for something that is never going to happen is more vexatious to the spirit than just about anything else – barring waiting for a root canal, or Godot.

A certain amount of waiting may be unavoidable, and that is why God invented waiting rooms and outdated women’s magazines – although if there is such a thing as God’s waiting room, I hope there will be something more up to date and interesting to read.

But after a week on standby, waiting for too many things at once (some of which, mercifully, have now come through) I’m switching back on to the here and now. Everything else can wait.