Enjoy The Journey

  • Lipi Patel
  • India
  • May 25, 2012

It’s a dusty windy night; Gurgaon can look beautiful at night. My balcony where I am sitting right now, overlooks the highway. Watching a battery of headlights speeding crazily to and fro on NH8, I desperately wait – and wait. Wait for the rain drops to kiss my face; the roaring clouds are increasing my hope. It just makes me wonder how painfully beautiful is this experience of “waiting” – waiting to reach your destination, to keep faith, to keep trying, to struggle till we reach there.

I remember myself as a very patient kid; but my experience says that with growing age we start to despise waiting. Today, with the help of growing technology and timesaving appliances, it seems patience, once a virtue, has now become an anachronism. The whole generation is going crazy about 3G internet, fast cars, non - stop traffic. It seems nobody wants to wait.

I have heard that, not more than three decades ago, long distance lovers used to wait for several days to hear from each other – and that too through letters. The patience of letter writing has given way to 24*7 instant connectivity – through Black berry, Google chats and Skype. I remember the pre - mobile phone era myself, when I used to hunt for PCO booths for making a call. PCOs seem to be an extinct species now. I can’t believe that we, as a generation, have survived the pre-mobile phone era – for today this device seems almost indispensable to most of us.

Waiting, while tedious, can actually be quite valuable. They say “good things come to those who wait”. I read somewhere that “Waiting” is great for creativity. When you are struggling to solve a problem, the more time you have, the more creative you become; the more you struggle, the more you will value success when you achieve it. The same goes for our relationships. More often than not, I have seen my friends reaching to conclusions of separation and break up too soon – without even trying to give the situation some time, and seeing what happens. But of course, who has the time and patience these days? Wise people have said that finding one’s ideal love, relationship, partner, job, career, money takes a hell of a lot of patience. All of these will eventually come, but we just need to wait for them.

All of these lessons are duly noted; but how do you convince a generation of instant-gratification seekers to wait (sometimes for years), when we can’t even sit through one commercial break?!

Furthermore, how do you teach this same generation, the one that grew up listening to adages such as, “don’t just sit around and wait” or “you have to act quickly, otherwise opportunities will pass you by”, that “good things will come to those who wait” – when it feels like everyone else is speeding ahead?

The most crucial question is - How do you know (or convince yourself) that something good is really on its way? And how do you stop thinking and waiting for it to come instantly?

Even if you are a believer, who has immense faith in the art of “enjoying the journey”, there will be many occasions when you feel like giving it up. In such times, the only thing that works, I believe, is reminding yourself that life happens in the present. So often we let time rush past; we are either worrying about the future or reflecting on the past – while precious seconds of our lives slip away. We’re so focused on what’s next, that we neglect what’s now.

So here I am, trying to learn an alternative way - living in the moment; fully experiencing the here and now. And I hope and believe that eventually I will achieve what I want. 

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