Now I don’t have to tell you
How slow the night can go
I know you’ve watched for the lightAnd I bet you could tell me
How slowly four follows three
And you’re most forlorn just before dawn
–Everything But The Girl/We Walk The Same Line
You know what sucks?
(Lots of things)
Waiting for answers.
I have no trouble with being stuck in traffic because I can listen to music and sing. Waiting for an appointment in a doctor’s office is fine because I can read. Kindle for smart phones is a waiting room life saver.
If I’m waiting to hear back about exam results or about something I am trying to coordinate or just an answer to a call or email?
Argh. I hate it.
The more important the answer is to me, the worse it is. If I don’t know when I will get a response, it can be excruciating.
Once I got the sweetest letter from my first
boyfriend who had moved across the country just a week or two prior. I was especially thrilled since I hadn’t really expected to hear from him again. When you’re 12 or 13, and someone moves to the opposite coast, things are pretty much over. This was back when long distance calls were expensive and snail mail was really the only option for people to stay in touch.
So I wrote back and waited for a reply. I counted how many days it had taken for his letter to get to me. Multiplied it by 2 and added a few days. Waited some more.
I didn’t hear back.
Back then, of course, that might only have meant that a letter was lost in the mail. So I wrote again. Counted the days again. Once again, there was no reply. It made for a long Summer, watching for the mail every day. Waiting for a letter.
I’m not sure when I stopped waiting for the answer to my letters. When school started, I started to fall madly in love with another boy. Sometimes there are very pleasant ways to end a wait that doesn’t have a definite end.
You can’t usually count on falling in love to distract you though.
Sometimes there are very unpleasant things that force you to give up. Someone could die, or be injured. Sometimes there isn’t really any way to tell specifically when you to stop waiting. Waiting for someone to tell you he loves you. How do you know when to stop waiting for that?
Today, if you send a message and don’t get a reply for half a day it seems like forever. If you have to wait a day or two, it seems like a big deal. When I was a teenager, it was about four days for a letter to go across the country. Nine days was about the soonest you could really hope to hear back. You wouldn’t really start to feel like maybe there was a problem for two or three weeks.
If you were waiting for a phone call in those pre-cellular, pre-voicemail, even pre-answering machine days, there were a host of other things that you could worry about!
Now the impatience and worry sets in almost immediately.
Back then, waiting took time. It was more of an endurance event–but you had a little bit of a grace period before the waiting anxiety or fear of not getting a reply would set in.
Better or worse?