I don’t read much fiction, a fact of which I am not proud, but a few years ago I read a book that haunts me. The book was a best-seller by the Chinese author Ha Jin, called “Waiting,” in which a Chinese physician was caught in an arranged marriage and, because divorce was not legal, spent 18 years of his life waiting to marry a nurse with whom he fell in love.
In these modern times and in this western world, we are used to things happening quickly. It is difficult to wait for anything. We want our fast food, our fast cars, and, well…. And as I recognize the person staring back at me in the mirror less and less, waiting seems even more difficult. Time is a limited commodity, and there is simply less of it left in the bottle to drink.
But time is only experience; it is nothing more. And “waiting” is nothing more than wishing or imagining we were somewhere other than where we are now. So, we suffer from our imagination. We suffer from wishing our hands were doing something else, our eyes were feasting on a different sight.
So let us breathe in patience, and appreciate each moment to the extent our neuroses allow. In the Midwest there is a saying: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So, let’s let wishes be horses, and let’s let them ride off into the sunset with empty saddles.
