Waiting.

Something that I find extremely frustrating is mastering the art of patience.

They say 'patience is a virtue' but I want to be there yesterday. Not tomorrow. We live in a society where a take-away pizza will get to your door before the police, you can have a hot meal on your plate in 5 minutes with the aid of a microwave. Where it's easier to contact people with the aid of social networking sites such as facebook (still not on it for lent and feel completely out of touch with the world!), mobile phones with apps like BBM or ping than it is to you know, actually meet in person. I've realised how hard it is to remain anonymous in such a society. I'm not actually sure I like it. Hmmm...

The first part of this post has been saved in drafts for a while and I remembered it today when I was in a seminar earlier on. It was a seminar on a director/theatre 'composer' called Robert Wilson. I won't bore you with all the biographical information about his life and works and blah blah blah (although, as a drama student, I generally found it all very interesting) He liked to create very long productions, concentrating mostly on the idea of theatricality, not a representation of anything, but of creativity. His works were choreographed precisely, and would often include pauses. Long pauses. One of his plays in particular starts with a half an hour freeze frame of a woman with her two children. Motionless. She then pours them a glass of milk and stabs them. Interesting to say the least. In an interview with him that we watched in the lecture, he was of the opinion that these long pauses were there for audiences to reflect. This caused some controversy amongst some people in my seminar group. In particular, one member of the group argued that she didn't like to be told when to reflect, and preferred the theatre to be a place where she could escape. In some ways I think she was probably right, but her reasoning was 'I don't want to sit there and think about how crap my life is.' In no place did he say 'I'm going to torture you by making you sit and think about your terrible, terrible life.' But that got me thinking (oh dear)

Life is busy. Often too busy to reflect on stuff. I know how difficult I find it to stay in silence in one place for too long without having something to do to busy myself, by finding some music to listen to, something to watch on youtube or occasionally doing some uni work! Every little thing makes us really busy, and I'm guessing Wilson wanted to create a space where people could just; be, thinking about life, pondering things that they wouldn't usually in everyday life.
How often are our lives sooo consumed with business that we forget what it's like to...be?
Are we actually a little bit scared of being alone somewhere with just our thoughts for company?

I called this post 'Waiting.', and before I went off in an entirely different direction I was talking about patience. Often all we are concerned about is living in the now, consumerism, what's 'in style' what's 'the latest gossip' our latest love interest. Thinking about the 'not yet' goes as far as panicking about our personal future, about what kind of career we will have, getting a foot on the property ladder etc. etc. etc. Don't get me wrong, by blogging this, in NOO way am I saying it's wrong to be thinking of all these things, I just think mastering patience is important when it comes to the future, because before we know it, we're sitting in a rocking chair in a nursing home looking back on our lives wondering what the hell we were worrying about.

It's all going to be just fine. Life will throw some rubbish at us occasionally, but you should never let it stop you achieving all you can :)