Waiting Room

I remember as a kid how excruciatingly painful it was to wait for something. Your parents tell you "It'll be just a minute" and what feels like hours later, they're finally done with whatever menial task they were working on. You would sit and wait, bored and grumpy as they went shopping, paid bills, talked with old people, and did anything else to make you furious for ever leaving the house with them. Perhaps as a child everything seems more exciting and there is so much to explore, so we become agitated and want to do all those things we need to do before the day is over, or maybe our "stuff we've done" to "time we've been alive" ratio is really screwed up. After all, one year to an eight year old is a huge chunk of their existence.
Now we're older, and some might say we have a firmer grasp on time. We comprehend how short a day really is, while at the same time understand that we have potential for many many days after.
I revere the sages of my childhood, those people that seemed to know everything, do everything, be everything, and live at peace with every moment that came to them. Things seem so hustle and bustled these days and there seems to be little time to listen. We finally get that opportunity to fill our days with what we want, and we seem to waste so much of that time.
I believe technology is the sharpest double edge sword. I know I've mentioned this before, but technology has been the cheap replacement for many invaluable things in our lives. I've lost so much due to technology, and despite the obvious pros it gives to us, I traded my wonderful talents for an immediate satisfaction. I can't talk anymore.
Look back at the last five years of your life and you will come to know what I'm talking about. Perhaps this wasn't everyone, but I remember spending hours on end talking with all my friends about everything and nothing. We confided, we schemed, we laughed, we contemplated, and we listened. Now I can barely get to an hour without finding myself uncomfortable, fidgety, and uninterested. I'm going to try really hard to get that back. I want to listen again; I want to be listened to again. It was such a simple emotion, but it was so fantastic looking back on it all. If I can just take a minute and analyze all the time I spend in a day and make room for that slowing down once more, maybe I can find the secret to getting back what I once had.
I don't mind waiting anymore. I used to mind, but now I've realized that waiting is just the world telling me I need to slow down. We have countless vents to our communication now, we don't need to actually sit with someone and talk. If we want our opinion heard, we go onto our numerous community networking sites and we blurt out the first thing on our mind. It's easy, it's quick, and it's a pretty good counterfeit, but it will never compensate for that one on one communication we can have with another person. I want to try an experiment. I want to try listening to what someone says without already having an answer in my head. I want to stop using my own experiences to compare. I want to stop saying "I understand." I want to stop only saying and start doing. If you're with me, do it today. Remember all those ambitions as a child and start making room for the things you want now. Make time to do nothing at all. In our day it is so easy to be doing something, but it is something completely different to do nothing.
This is not a catch all. I do not expect this to be your thought process every day, but once in a while, try something different. As Albert Einstein defined it, insanity is "...doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Please do something to make yourself happy. It's a choice we make, and it is the best of all choices. Take a number, sit down, and drink a philosophy in a tea cup.