It seems like everything in life and perhaps beyond seems to require some kind of wait. When we are born, it’s as if our new life couldn’t wait to burst onto the scene and immediately we are hungry or thirsty or need warmth and shelter or love and attention or changing and cleaning or any number of things that a baby needs. We don’t know what it is to wait Until we have to. When we have to wait for our birthday to arrive. We have to wait for Christmas. We wait for mom or dad to come home from work. We wait for the school bus and for lunch and Risa. We wait for our report card. We wait for dinner we wait for dessert! And as a child, the one thing we don’t wait for is bedtime, but of course that changes when we are an adult. When we grow up, we wait for bigger things like graduation, important news, raises or promotions at work. We wait as patiently as possible to find someone we love who hopefully loves us just as much and then we wait for marriage and perhaps children, and then we wait on them. Then they wait for us to hurry up and come on, and on and on. Of course, we wait in lines. A lot. Lines feeding into lines. Strung together like beads. Sometimes it’s worth the wait and sometimes it’s not. We wait in line at the bank, at the grocery store, in the pick up line. We wait for our turn. We wait to speak. We wait for the right moment. We wait behind some and we wait in front of others. At the ticket booth. At the car wash. At the concession stand. The weight of all this waiting is felt in our feet, our knees, hips and spine. But still, we have to wait in line. We can’t cut. If we do, there are consequences. We wait to be announced. We wait to be told. We wait in order. We wait for the train, sometimes on the wrong platform. We wait for children to tie their shoes. We wait for our elders to cross the street. Sometimes we stop waiting long enough to help them. We wait for opportunities and sometimes we miss them because we waited too long. Sometimes we step out of line and have to wait all over again. We queue up so we can wait over and over again. And these lines seem to last forever. Waiting for fate to arrive. But fate doesn’t take forever. We just don’t always have the patience to wait much longer. But what choice do we have? Still we must standby and bide our time but hopefully get blissfully distracted while we wait. We wait to see if they saw us waiting for their glance. We wait because perhaps, chance, it was worth the wait. We wait for their call or text. We wait while they are late. We wait and wait. We wait for the other shoe to drop. We are elated when they arrive and no longer have to wait. We wait for them to say they will. We wait to hear back. We wait for them to say they’re ready, sorry, grateful. We wait to let go. We breathe and wait ten seconds before we might explode. We wait for the air to clear. We wait for the pain to stop. We wait to leave and then we wait to board. We can wait so long and then we can wait no more. But like the child that needs at last to go to bed and dream we try to ignore what all this waiting leads us to. We don’t want to have to rest. We would rather wait a little while longer, please. We try to outrun what waiting around for enough years becomes. It feels too weighty to stop and wonder, what was all this waiting about? And when our waiting is done at last and we can time can finally wait no more, many waiting in line to pay their respects to us must wait for our last will to be delivered then outwait time long enough to collect their reward for waiting with us on the way. And then, of course, we must each wait in line at the pearly gates for our final judgment, which we hope we can weigh in on, but we can only wait and see what forever brings… While we wait.