Hurry up and Wait

Last night was an interesting night for me. A tree fell in my neighbor's yard and I ended up with no power for the rest of night. So I ended up going to the dollar store and stocking up on candles and candle holders. I also bought brand new batteries for the flashlights. After that I did the only thing I can do to pass the time...read.

I ended up finishing a book I should have finished a long time ago, Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho. I read more that a hundred pages and I was glad to finally put that book to rest. When I was done, I just sat in my room amongst the candles to realize what a romantic sight I was beholding. A room full of candles (some were scented) and me on a bed with a book. Not sure many men would be caught dead alone with that type of scene. Anyway, I realized that all of us are bound by time and yet all we do is try to rush things in our lives.

It is true about what was written in The Alchemist. When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. It took me a while to figure how true this is. The two things that I discovered in this book was not only the idea that we have a personal legend to fulfill but that we also need to wait in order to achieve it. Sure the book is about following our dreams and in many ways I have admitted to mine, but the inner meaning to this book is that everything takes time. The main character in this book does all he can to put his goals in motion but, he also spends a great deal of time waiting...for that right moment.

As a kid in Catholic school, I remember priests saying that when you pray to God that he will always have one of three answers: Yes, No, and Wait. We spend so much of our time trying to rush things. We want instant gratification these days because we live in a time of fast food and the internet. Everything is so within our grasps that not many people truly know what it is to wait for something. Interestingly enough, the less we wait for something, the less we tend to appreciate it.

This is probably the reason why people hate the job searching process, which is nothing but wait. We put all our energies in a document that has all of our skills and experiences and we put it out there for the world to view. Then we wait to see if anyone has taken notice of us. If they have, then we have to wait for the interviews and the decision...all of which makes us wait.Yet, if all goes the way we want and we achieve that end result then the waiting would seem like a blessing.

Time is the one thing that none of us can fight. We all have to face the hands of time. We can try to rush it but what happens when things are rushed? Bad decisions are made, a mess is created and we now spend more time cleaning up messes than we would spent by simply taking our time to get the desired end result. Most of us try to make the perfect decision without making a mistake and that is worse than rushing. Because trying to be perfect may mean taking time to create the perfect outcome may result in living a life in a house of cards.

Yes, I am being vague because time is vague but yet I can come up with a perfect example. Think about baseball and how a pitcher tries to make the perfect pitch with the bases loaded. Instead of pitching without fear of consequence, more often that perfect pitch ends up as the perfect home-run.

My point is that all the goals that I have set for myself are finally being completed and it took so long to get to this point. While the universe may conspire in our favor to help us achieve our desires it take as long as it has to for it to come true. The universe itself took billions of years to achieve the beauty that it is now I am sure we can wait as long as we have to attain our beauty.