YOUNG VOICE
Waiting for the Chicken Nuggets
Patience is a virtue.
I often times deliberately fool myself while muttering a fantastical reassurance of morality. I seek a temporary condolence from a battered and abused cliché. But often times my intolerance to turtle-paced conditions always gets the better of me. Though the world still rotates on its axis for 24 hours, much can be done; the definition of a day’s worth has extended its vocabulary. The world has learned to speed up and double the doubled time. The world has denounced the mediocrity of stasis; it has to keep on moving with so much work, but so little time. Getting our to-do lists done is gradually growing up to be an obsession. I guess this may be the reason why we tend to be more impatient that we inherently are. Waiting, today, is never an option. Waiting, today, is simply doing nothing at all.
I queue up in a fast food chain with the high hopes of getting fast food. Then here comes the cashier telling me, “Ma’am, are you willing to wait for 15 minutes for your Chicken Nuggets?” Are they sure they wanted me to answer that? For a hungry and nearly hypoglycemic cholesterol-crazed fatso like me, I honestly have thought of more than a hundred of nasty and unnecessary customer complaints. But I want those Chicken Nuggets. So, I waited.
I exhaust additional two days of enrollment than my classmates because I opted to process a scholarship grant. Then here comes the signatories with their roster of excuses for not being around during enrollment period: on sick leave, on vacation leave, on a conference, etcetera. Oh come on. I’m a scholar for crying out loud. I spent the entire semester keeping my grades looking pretty and all I get is an unsigned and not-yet-approved scholarship form with the anxiety of not being able to enroll myself on time. But I wanted to get a discount. So, I waited until the signatories returned to office from their weeklong sunbathing at Boracay.
Waiting is a meddling activity and would appear to yield the conclusion of a total waste of time. Waiting make us do the least productive activities: beat the top score in Snakes II, listen to your I-pod playlist for 30 times without shuffling, or make imaginary bubble thoughts with the unaware passers-by. However, since I want those chicken nuggets and the scholarship grant, I have to, I need to, I must wait. Much to my surprise, the chicken nuggets tasted juicier after 15 minutes of waiting. The scholarship grant felt more rewarding after a weeklong of office-to-office visits.
I realized that most of our life’s satisfactions are results of ample waiting. A healthy and term baby is born after nine months of waiting. A high-standard wine is bottled after years of brewing. A treasure chest of wisdom is achieved after a lifetime of experiences. A crisp diploma is handed after years of submitting to academic demands.
The youth, on a special note, adapts to the trend of society and is becoming more and more impulsive. The youth regresses to rely on immediate gratification with the advent of copy-pasted and Wikipedia-sourced techniques of doing homework and the rise in premarital teenage pregnancies and drug addiction. The world is getting more and more impatient. The world has lost its joy of waiting. I am guilty of my more than often attacks of impatience. That is why I write to appeal and hope to wake up the slumbering patience from my readers.
Aside from being a virtue, I hold a strong belief that patience, too, is innate. Remember the time you first decide to run after and catch the fluttering dragonfly. You stool still for an hour or two just to wait for the perfect time to catch it unaware. And every time you fail to catch the dragonfly, you just heave a sigh and follow it again. To be frank about it, waiting is not exactly unproductive. Waiting is actually the key ingredient to produce the perfect wine, degree, or chicken nuggets. Waiting is not exactly boring. It is a tedious activity in this energetic world. Though, we live in a fast track the principle of “slow but sure” rings astoundingly true. Those done out of patience and waiting are those that we truly treasure and give more value. Handmade crafts are more expensive than machine-made products.
Oh yes. Patience is a virtue, especially nowadays, when everyone else is impatient.
When you wait, congratulations, you’re on your way to sainthood.
Besides, you don’t want your chicken nuggets to be half-cooked, right?
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Photo source: www.3gatti.com/ Francesco-Gatti/godot-scenography/godot-scenography.htm
