Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.

Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead. Most of these people are very immature; they lead still lives, waiting.

Waiting for what?

Waiting for someone to save them. Expecting someone to save them, or at least protect them from the big bad world. The thing is no one else can save them because the problem is theirs, and so is the solution. Only they can get out of it.

If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives.

For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.

To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine percent is just living in waiting. I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.

To wait for life is the pathway to death.

You think you have forever, but you do not. It all happens, and it happens quickly. You are not waiting on another person, or the right timing, or for everything to fall into place. You are waiting to feel ready enough to exist within the questions, to not need every answer, and to know that this life does not come to us perfectly understood, but to be fully experienced, in every direction we can possibly reach.

And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting, we say, is long. We might just as well — or more accurately — say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such. We may compare him who lives on expectation to a greedy man, whose digestive apparatus works through quantities of food without converting it into anything of value or nourishment to his system. We might almost go so far as to say that, as undigested food makes man no stronger, so time spent in waiting makes him no older. But in practice, of course, there is hardly such a thing as pure and unadulterated waiting.

One can say that he consumed one whole week waiting for the return of that single hour every seven days — and waiting means racing ahead, means seeing time and the present not as a gift, but as a barrier, denying and negating their value, vaulting over them in your mind. Waiting, people say, is boring. But in actuality, it can just as easily be diverting, because it devours quantities of time without our ever experiencing or using them for their own sake.

Why does it often take extreme life situations to bring back an awareness of the magic and mystery of life? Why do we often wait until we’re about to die before discovering a deep gratitude for life as it is? Why do we exhaust ourselves seeking love, acceptance, fame, success, or spiritual enlightenment in the future? Why do we work or meditate ourselves into the grave? Why do we postpone life? Why do we hold back from it? What are we looking for exactly? What are we waiting for? What are we afraid of? Will the life we long for really come in the future? Or is it always closer than that?

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting, it is life. Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin.

For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end.

How much of human life is lost in waiting.