The bus stop feeling.
Just standing there, side of the road, looking to see if that bus is finally going to come.
Checking the app, maybe, but it's not always accurate.
It might say five minutes, then five minutes later it says five minutes.
Or you're looking, you see the light: oh, is that a bus?
No, it's not a bus.
Just looking.
You hear a truck come, it sounds like a bus, but no.
Just waiting.
And how many times, how many minutes have we spent, adding up to hours?
Anybody that has had experience of this- and I guess you could say the same with trains, too, but there's something especially unpleasant about waiting for the bus.
Maybe it's because it's by the side of the road there.
But just waiting for something to come so that you can finally move along to the next step.
And it's like this feeling of being frozen.
You can't achieve anything.
You can't move forward in what you want to do.
You are just passively sitting, or standing, and just doing nothing.
And your mind is focused on trying to anticipate when this thing will come, and kind of hoping that time moves quicker so that it can finally come and you can finally move on.
Looking for external signs, like is it coming or not?
And I always found this time to be very unpleasant.
I mean, it just seems like such a waste of time.
It seems like the time that we have, we should either be being productive, doing useful things, or having fun, doing pleasant things.
If our time is neither productive or pleasant, then what are we doing?
What is happening with that time?
So I don't like to ride the bus too much.
I try not to, and with everything being online now with the lockdown, that's been one thing I haven't missed, all that commuting around.
But it also seems like this is something that we do in life.
I mean, we can be waiting on external events to move us forward.
And it's easy to fall into this kind of state of just passively waiting for it to happen.
It could be something with employment, or a legal issue, or could be dealing with other people, waiting for them to change, or waiting for them to do something.
And it's like putting our lives at the mercy of something external.
And then there's this feeling of "Yeah, I'd like to improve my life, I'd like to, or just enjoy my life, but I can do neither.
I can neither improve my life, nor enjoy it, until XYZ happens.
I simply am in a state of waiting.
Suspended animation.
And everything that I want, I will have in this future state.
And I've fallen into this state without even realizing it.
I think when I was younger, when I was a kid, I thought there's all these things I'll do once I'm grown up.
And then when I'm an adult, I thought OK, well, maybe I'll do these things once I have more money saved up, or once I have solved all these issues.
Then I'll do all these things.
Always putting things off on with with some external- waiting on some external event.
So my thought for today is that I want to always avoid this, and always be on the lookout for letting myself fall into that passive waiting state.
And if I find myself doing that, I could for one thing think about do I really need to wait on this thing?
Is this thing that I'm waiting for really so critical?
And if it is, if I do have to wait on this thing in order to move forward in a particular area, then that area will be put on hold, but I'll do whatever I can without that thing.
Every other possible thing that I can get done while waiting on that thing, then now's the time to do it.
And then if everything is completely blocked, and I can't do anything else until that thing happens, then I can fill the time with other things to do, other things that will somehow help me.
And if even there's still absolutely nothing else to do at all, then I could simply have to find some way to enjoy the time.
But I find that hard to do.
Just little entertaining time-fillers, when I'm in that state of waiting for something, it's just not as fun.
But this is my principle, that time should either be productive or pleasant, either useful or fun.
And if it's neither, something's not right, and we have the ability, I believe, to fix it.
So I'd like to hear, of course, what you think about this idea.
What do you do when you're in that waiting state?
How can you change your mind in that situation?

#waitingforlife #stuckwaiting #busstopfeeling

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