Our life is very different from that of our ancestors.
Long live progress!
But since the introduction of automation, we have been exaggerating.
We confuse progress with consuming ever more and ever faster, and have lost sight of the limits of our physical and mental health, of the resilience of our environment and the exhaustion of our natural resources.
We are living faster than ever before and have run out of patience for satisfying our needs.
An airplane, that allows us to cross the ocean comfortably in an easy chair, still never goes fast enough for us. We check online what’s keeping up that delivery person for a meal that we only have to put on the table. In the car, waiting a few minutes for a red traffic light is too much to ask from us and we don’t want to wait for more than three seconds when loading a website – through a satelite in space nonetheless.
We have better things to do with our time!
But is that true? And what are those better things?
Even more consuming, doing, running, flying, stressing and getting irritated?
Constantly doing something usefull, even in our spare time? How is that still spare time?
We seem to have forgotten the art of waiting.
Waiting doesn’t have to be boring at all. Waiting has many advantages.
It gives us room to breathe, to look around us quietly, to feel the sun on our faces, to smell flowers, to hear the wind rustling through the leaves, to hear birds sing. It gives us the chance to sing, to dance, to enjoy our children and the people and the animals around us, to be creative. It gives us room to relax, room to view our busy life from a distance and to reconsider our choices. And above all, it gives us room to do nothing at all and to simply exist in the present, to slow down and enjoy ourselves.
Waiting is not a waste of time, but rather gives us back our time.
We are definitely worth the wait!