Sometimes We Think That Life Says “no ” While Saying “wait “

Sometimes we believe that life denies us what we want when in reality it is telling us “Wait, everything comes.” It is difficult for us to tolerate that each situation and each event has its time and that it is unusual for the world to keep pace with us.

We have grown up normalizing and internalizing that of “I want this and I want it now, I won’t wait any longer.” Then, when we perceive that what we really want does not come when we want it, we realize that each desire has its time and that in the rush the only thing we achieve is to banish illusions.

It is about investing in effort to reap the harvest of success, of the achievement of our objectives, goals and desires. Only by failing, falling and getting up will we be able to savor what we long for today and it seems that it never comes.

The same happens with love, which does not come when we look for it but when it feels like it. This is something that we cannot understand and that makes us desperate to unsuspected limits. In fact, when we desire love and it does not appear, we end up believing that we are less valid and deserving of it than the people who have it.

Wait: everything passes, everything arrives and everything transforms

The truth is that saying something like “wait, everything arrives” requires that we do a great exercise in self-control. In other words, as we are going to see in the following video, if someone puts a chocolate in front of us that we love and asks us not to eat it until a certain time has passed, we will try not to focus on the chocolate to cope with the waiting situation.

That is, we will use self-control strategies that allow us to be able to suppress the temptation to eat the chocolate or any other sweet (in the video, marshmallows). This is touching when we see a child in that situation. Those who endure the wait use strategies such as dancing, singing, covering their eyes, playing …

This experiment was originally conducted in the 1960s by psychologist Walter Mischel of Columbia University. In the subsequent follow-up of the children who participated, it was found

Now let’s get out of this metaphor and understand that deferring the reward is something we do on a daily basis (for example going to work to get money at the end of the month). The struggle between our desires and self-control (between gratification and delay) results in great emotional learning from a young age.

Giving time to time helps us tolerate frustration

Sometimes rewarding events are delayed and our impatience can break the thread of circumstances or, if we prefer, tear down the walls that we already had built for our castle.

What is really worthwhile requires a great effort and an enormous capacity for waiting and sacrifice that sometimes defeats us emotionally and physically. We fail to understand why our little moment of glory has not yet arrived and we collapse in the face of uncertainty.

However, most of them do not escape us:

• What we really value is what we put our heart and soul into; In other words, what costs us effort and tenacity.
• Nothing improves if we do not move to achieve it.
• Responsibility and consistency with our goals are the only ways to achieve what we want.
• In life each one must be the captain of his sailboat, because if you do not direct yourself you will never reach a good port, which will make you sail lost in the high seas for much of your existence.
• It is very important to always try to improve based on what we know, believe appropriate and other people with more experience tell us.
• It is not necessary to do everything right, there is no perfection in anything.
• Great things can happen while waiting.
• Everything comes, but time never goes back again.

If finally what we want does not work out, we must be aware that nothing that happens to us is a mistake. Every decision in the moment in which we make it and every feeling in the moment in which it is with us, seems to be the right thing to do.

That is why it is important that we do not give up on making sense of everything that happens to us, because as Victor Frankl said, “life is potentially meaningful until the last moment, until the last breath, thanks to the fact that meanings can be extracted even from the suffering”.

Lead image by Christian Schloe