Whilst queuing for my coffee yesterday  I glanced across and saw a rather long queue at a nearby sushi bar.

This started me thinking about how much time, over our lives, we spend waiting. For all sorts of things.

These days we have something to while away the waiting time. Someone invented the mobile phone. Scrolling one’s phone is now seemingly the favourite way to endure the wait, to pass the time and to finally reach the end of the queue, and the required service.

The act of Waiting has never sat well with me. It is not something I excel at. In fact, I’m very bad at it.

I freely admit that, even though I’m working on improving this situation,  I still have little patience. 

As a child, I was a master of the “are we there yet?”syndrome, it drove my parents metaphorically mad.

” Wait til your father gets home” was a frequent threat from Mother, when myself & sisters played up, which was almost daily. I could never quite see the sense of waiting to be yelled at by Dad. 

The teenage years were full of my own impatience. Waiting for school exam results, waiting for boyfriends to call, waiting for just about anything to happen was a tortuous exercise. 

Going to job interviews and waiting for a call was the worst, no mobile phones in those days. Just one long, nervous, apprehensive wait for the landline call, or the mail.

But then a short corporate career, followed by a long stint as a small business owner, provided me some unexpected relief. I used my restlessness and impatience to my advantage. If something needed doing, I did it straight away. Or at least had an attempt. No procrastination from me thank you very much.

But later,in childbirth, and I went there four times, I was so impatient that nurses, doctors, and quite possibly my unborn child had a little laugh to themselves at my expense. Just hurry up and get born, baby!

The childrearing years for some reason became  a lot less frantic. So much to be done each and every day, there was no time for impatience. I’d also discovered jogging and the gym by then. Happy days. Exercise definitely did calm my soul.

These days, being a tad older, my affliction is easing. I don’t buy online, I don’t click & collect, I avoid home delivery. If I need anything I go out and buy it.

I don’t play the waiting game much at all. Bliss.

But last week I got caught out. Serves me right for my history of impatience. The Universe paid me back.

Having outside carpentry work done at home for the first time,I was, yes, waiting on a timber delivery from a well known timber and hardware merchant. 

Up at 6am , showered , dressed, breakfasted , waiting. 

And waiting. And getting agitated.

Until 2pm. 

As a result, the carpenter had to go to another job . My job had to wait.

Apparently these days, you can’t ask where your delivery is. You just wait. 

And at 2pm it arrived. With one batch of wrong sized timber. 

This was of course the very timber needed to start the job. Which would have been completed before the scheduled week of rain  about to fall on Kiama. But now won’t be.

The next day, the replacement timber arrived at 9.30 am. 

The waiting wasn’t so bad. I didn’t wait at all.

I let hubby do it while I slept in.