To Wait

Last night at around four in the morning, I checked out Adam Young's blog page and saw a new entry. I decided to sleep away and save the reading for tomorrow (which was today) because even if I haven't read the post yet, I knew it was something worth it to wake up to. There's no other stranger in this planet that inspires me like Adam Young does, and I can say that over and over again. I hope he would never grow tired of writing.

On his recent post about airports, delayed flights and hotel rooms, he writes about the beauty of the here and now. Again, he hits the point spot on. It's never easy to wait, but waiting is one of the most beautiful things in the world. We wait in queue for our turn to the dentist, wives of US Army men wait for their husbands to come home, children wait for Christmas. In waiting, we slow things down. In waiting, we enjoy both what we do and don't have.

Similarly, in the SILS Opening Ceremony yesterday, Dean (Professor) Morita in his opening speech said that the world can be measured using distance or time. The distance between here to there never changes, but the time it takes for us to reach point A to point B shortens as technology advances. Ergo, the world is not shrinking in geography, but it is getting smaller with respect to the time dimension.

Both inspiring encounters make for the conclusion that: it's beautiful to wait, but man, in his impatience, has made it possible to wait for a shorter time. I guess that is a reasonable compromise. We have availed ourselves of the chance to feed our impatience but at the same time not skip the opportunity to wait.

I sort of believe that everything in life is polar. There are always two extremes: rewind and fast forward, introvert and extrovert, liberal and conservative, love and hate, fast and slow. Nothing though, would be as great as some good old compromise. It isn't exactly mediocrity. I'd hate to quote Hannah Montana but it's like the best of both worlds.