I’ll be waiting

Think of something you do in your life and you can be pretty sure that there’ll be a statistic for it somewhere.

Sleeping? Well, you spend about 14 years doing that.

Eating? Let’s go for about 7 years.

Feeding the cat? That’s got to be at least 2 years.

Even seemingly rare occurrences such as clipping your nails, putting the bins out or saying something encouraging to someone else must rack up the months over the course of a lifetime. In fact, only two weeks after its release date, the new Muse album has probably taken up about twelve hours of my life so far. Twelve glorious hours.

But what about waiting? How long does not actually doing anything take up?

My life seems to involve a lot of waiting at the moment:

- Waiting for my friend’s baby to be born

- Waiting for the Muse album to come out (we finally got there with that one)

- Waiting to be able to use my left arm again (hurrah, the time has come!)

- Waiting for a couple of emails I’d really like to receive

- Waiting for my dinner when my wife’s late home from work (I’m still playing the ‘I can’t really cook with only one arm’ card…)

- Waiting for inspiration so that I don’t end up writing blog posts about waiting

The Bible claims that those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength but it’s less clear on what will happen to those of us waiting upon our dinner or the latest bit of bold-type to appear at the top of our inbox. My guess – and it’s a guess built upon quite a bit of experience recently – is that this sort of waiting is actually likely to sap rather than renew our strength and I’m not convinced that living in 2012 is helping me/us with any of this.

Even if I move away from the computer – and I do, occasionally, do this – then I am likely to be only inches away from my phone which now has the capacity to do pretty much everything the computer can do. Certainly, it is more than capable of catalysing my crushing obsession with just having one more quick check…

What must it have been like to have lived in a time when news came to you via a hand-delivered note (preferably on a silver tray carried by a butler) and you could happily while away the hours/days in between each correspondence without the slightest anxiety as to why you hadn’t heard back within a few minutes of your message being written? I suppose it must have been possible to relax, to sit back and accept that you wouldn’t hear anything for days on end. Maybe this is how books got written and read for so many years?

Now? Well, to be honest I think I’ve probably checked email/Facebook/Twitter three or four times while writing this blog. Surprisingly enough, not an enormous amount has happened but I might just pop off quickly to see if that’s changed since the last check…

OK, I’m back (apparently, front-row tickets for the Rolling Stone concert will cost £1000) and I’m off to post this now and then wait for the statistics to roll in.

Reading Sam’s blog? Be careful, you could probably spend a couple of months of your life doing that.

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(N.B. All statistics included in this blog are pure guesswork – I considered looking them up but decided that it would be a waste of my precious waiting time)