Waiting

No offense to Americans, but we are an impatient people. Perhaps this is a good thing in some ways, for it seems to have produced a system in which efficiency is important. Time is money, and therefore, things must move quickly or someone loses cash. It's got its downsides, though, too. We hate queuing, delays, traffic, tardiness. We don't value the things we do but rush to get them done so we can move on to the next thing. Instead of enjoying, for example, a snow day, we worry about the delay in the work we could be doing at the office. While stuck in traffic, we could listen to uplifting music, pray, compose poetry, or use our expansive imaginations to create tales about people in other cars. Waiting in a queue on Black Friday, we could strike up a conversation with the woman behind us about her purchases or her Thanksgiving feast.

 

Yes, that's idealistic. I myself am guilty of impatience. I feel for Inigo in The Princess Bride: "I hate waiting." I want things done now, not tomorrow, and certainly not two weeks from now.

 

Africans, my husband included, have a lot to teach me about waiting. I'm not sure whether they're good waiters because the system is so slow in general, or whether the system is so slow because people don't mind waiting; it's the chicken and the egg. But either way, Africans know how to wait patiently. I'm not saying people don't grumble. But somehow, life goes on, even when October's salary isn't paid until January, when the traffic police cause an hour's delay in a long journey, when the electrician who says he's "coming right now" doesn't actually show up for three days... I see it all around me: people who know a thing or two about waiting.

 

David and I are waiting for something, too. David has a hugely important interview on Thursday, 4 December, at roughly 08:00 GMT+1 (02:00 Eastern U.S.) in Lagos, and I find myself waiting. I get worried about absolutely everything (I get it from my mom), but this will cause me to lose sleep. As I type, David is on a night bus to Lagos, which in itself makes me cringe. Night buses are notoriously unsafe, between armed robbery on the road and traffic accidents. But I trust he'll arrive safely. In the meantime, I'm waiting for a text message to say he's safely at Point A along the journey. And then tomorrow I have to wait here while he waits there, just sitting and waiting. Thursday morning will be the worst, waiting for his message about how the interview went.

 

I hate waiting.