I remember when my mom first got internet at home. We had to hook it up to the phone, listen to the terribly loud dial sounds, and wait.
Fast forward to now.
Amazon delivers stuff within a day. We scroll reels on social media faster than ever. Video after video, constant stimulation, right at our fingertips. Everything keeps getting faster.
This is seemingly all in the name of convenience — not having to wait.
But there is power in waiting. If you get everything you could ever want, at the exact time you want it, the value of those things plummet. There’s no patience involved, the work is absent, nothing is earned.
Stand in line anywhere and look around. You’ll probably see at least half the people looking down, at their phone. Instant stimulation. Instant distraction.
Waiting denies the right to take what we want when we feel like we deserve to have it. It provokes thought. It brings reflection.
Eventually it produces patience. And then appreciation.
These things aren’t supposed to be easy. We’re not supposed to scroll through life like we do our phone. We can’t go from reel to reel until we find something entertaining to hover over. All the best things in life didn’t happen over night. They couldn’t have.
But we don’t want to wait for anything.
There’s an engineer somewhere out there right now pouring their life’s work into building the next cell phone network so that future you will be able to navigate your phone faster. That’s wild.
In the truth of it all, we don’t like to wait because it’s hard. The future is unknown. We’re an anxious people.
There’s nothing easy about giving patience a try.
But allowing yourself the necessary time for things that matter, for the big decisions, can be invaluable to growth.
There is nothing wrong with carefully choosing, carefully reflecting, and carefully waiting. In a world where our time seems to matter more to us than people, patience is becoming more scarce, making this new rarity something to cherish.
Delayed gratification is becoming a lost art. There’s a lesson in the middle of the chaos. Don’t miss it. They say Rome wasn’t built in a day.
So whatever it is you’re waiting for — give it a second. A sunset is only possible when it has time to reach the horizon.