Waiting Through Life

The urban landscape, particularly early in the morning when you’re still wiping sleep from your eyes, can feel heavy.  It is a world of moving metal, belching exhaust, impersonal towers of concrete and steel—a world which five days a week slurps half-dead people toward its crowded center.  Whether on the Metro in Washington DC or on a bus in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (above), I sometimes imagine what a perfectly awful world it would be if everyone maintained their sluggish, standoffish, rush hour demeanor beyond the morning.   I’d rather have anthrax sprinkled on my cereal.

The photo above shows a young woman who would rather be in bed, but it also reminds me of how "waiting" is an integral part of life.  I come from a country where waiting is neither particularly valued nor well practiced.  In some cultures, however, people are adept at it.  In Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s Three Cups of Tea—a book offering more insight into Pakistan than most newscasts ever will—there is a good example from the Balti, a people group who live in the rugged Karakoram Mountains.  Mortenson is trying to build a school for the village of Korphe and has invested considerable time in raising the necessary funds, only to discover he won’t be able to build the school until he can first build a bridge.  The village has never had a school and their desire for one is real, so when Mortenson breaks the news that he'll have to return to the States to raise more money for the bridge, he expects the people of Korphe to feel as awful as he does.  But they don't: 

[W]aiting was as much a part of their makeup as breathing the thin air at ten thousand feet.  They waited half of each year, in rooms choked with smoke from yak dung fires, for the weather to become hospitable enough for them to return outdoors.  A Balti hunter would stalk a single ibex for days, maneuvering hour by hour to get close enough to risk a shot with a single expensive bullet he could afford to spend.  A Balti groom might wait years for his marriage, until the twelve-year-old girl his parents had selected for him grew old enough to leave her family.  The people of the Braldu had been promised schools by the distant Pakistani government for decades, and they were waiting still.  Patience was their greatest skill.