How much of our lives do we spend waiting?

I waited 25 minutes tonight for a bus that runs every fifteen, impatiently pacing back and forth, jumping on and off benches, and confirming to the world that I am certifiably insane.

Technically, waiting is a choice, not a requirement. I could say I was spending 25 minutes in a low-key aerobics routine to the music in my head. I was thinking. Postulating.

How many of the world's greatest theorists have come up with their ideas while waiting?

I was thinking. (I'm cold, I want to go home, where's the bus, is there a new CSI episode on tonight.)

Profound discoveries aside, was I really worse off for waiting? Is life about those moments we choose carefully and plan, or about the ones that inadvertently get shoved between the cracks? Would we be the same without the people we see in these moments?

The kid wearing a dryclean only pinstripe suit that had been through the wash one too many times and a diagonally striped tie. The obese woman who waddled onto the bus and got off no more than 200 metres down the road. My lab partner from a physics course I took in first year. I can't even remember his name.

But we approached my stop, and I started thinking of what I could have accomplished in the 40 minutes I spent getting home.

How long did it take Beethoven to dream up the theme from his fifth symphony?

How many hours did Da Vinci spend envisioning how he would paint the Mona Lisa?

On another note, how many years did Bohr spend postulating before he decided that electrons existed only in quantized orbits around the nucleus? How many pea plants did Mendel have to tend and water before he realized (faked) that there was genetic heritability?

I realized that if I ever wanted to make such a discovery, I'd have to start soon.

So I ran home in my slippery socks and slip-on shoes, and realised as I flew downhill and my eyes teared up and my hair fell loose from its carefully constructed bun that none of it really mattered.

I only lost a shoe once.





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