Have you ever thought about how much of your life is spent waiting?
Waiting: noun; the act of staying in one place while expecting something to occur.
"According to a Timex survey, Americans wait on average of 20 minutes a day for the bus or train, 32 minutes whenever they visit a doctor and 28 minutes waiting in security lines whenever they travel. Americans wait 21 minutes for a significant other to get ready to go out.
Most Americans spend 13 hours annually waiting on hold for customer service, reports Time. The average American commuter spends 38 hours each year waiting in traffic, according to the Atlantic. Big city commuters average more than 50 hours waiting in traffic annually. Americans annually spend 37 billion hours waiting in line, according to the New York Times." [https://www.reference.com/science]
Wow. That's a lot of time waiting. So, what kind of waiter are you? Do you get anxious and frustrated? Pace? Get angry, even enraged? Do you clench your fists or your jaw? Does your body get tight, tense?
Lots of us do. And it adds to our stress and leaves us vulnerable to overload with more stimuli.
What do you wait for? Beyond those kinds of waiting noted in the quotation above, what else do you wait for? I was thinking of this as I waited for a phone call I was expecting. I thought of other times I find myself waiting. I wait for doctor feedback from my lab tests. I wait in line shopping. I wait for someone to pull out of a parking space close to the place I'm going. [I often am not up to walking far.] I wait for water to boil, food to cook, laundry to finish in the washer and dryer. I wait for the postal carrier.
I wait for ideas to come. All too often I wait to remember the right word. I wait for the office to warm up in the winter. I wait for purchases to be shipped and delivered to my house. I wait for vacation or for my birthday. I wait for family visits. I wait for websites to open, programs to load.
And most of the time I'm a calm waiter. I use wait time to think of solutions to problems, or I list things to do, or I imagine what other people are thinking or doing. I'm a people watcher and waiting is the perfect time for that.
Often, when I know I might be waiting, I take a book and read while I wait. And I keep recorded books in my car so I can listen when I'm driving and waiting.
I learned long ago that life is too short to make myself stressed out. I know that being frustrated and angry is the result of expectations that things "should" be a certain way, and when they aren't I don't have to stress out about it. I just check my expectations and accept that everything doesn't have to go the way I prefer. I check what values are fueling my expectations and ask myself, "How important is it? Is it worth me being so tense and stressed?" Usually the answer is no.
Expectation does not have to cause problems for me, does not have to harm my health and well-being. There are wants and there are needs. I create stress when I tell myself some thing is a need when in reality it is a want.
How many of the things you think you need could you live without? Because needs are about survival. Wants are about thriving. Most of us have everything we need and much of what we want. Why stress over thinking we won't survive if we don't have what we want?
I guess at my age, 77 years, I get a better perspective of what one needs to survive. All else is wanting a bit more [or in many cases a lot more].
So as you celebrate the upcoming holidays, I hope you will see the difference. And I hope the New Year brings you more than survival
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