The Waiting Game (part two)
Well this blog has certainly been a long time coming. In fact I’d go so far to say as this has been the longest gap between blogs that I’ve ever had since I established this website way back in 2008.
The reason for this rather tardy blogging of late, is of course, because I’ve been rather busy! Having wound up my housing contract in London I am now firmly ensconced in my small attic room in my Dad’s house way back down south in sunny Broadstairs.
Life with my family is certainly – how shall we say – ‘interesting’.
It’s hard to say whether I prefer living back home with my family at present or not. In fact I’d go so far as to say I’m feeling somewhat ambivalent towards the whole thing. On the plus side, I don’t have to spend most of my time clearing up after messy housemates, I don’t have the extortionate cost of London living, and I don’t have to spend most my time in a room smaller than an average U.K. prison cell. On the downside however I miss university, I miss my friends, and worst of all, I find living back with certain members of my family is a tiresome, and indeed stressful situation I’m not sure how much longer I can deal with.
But anyway… enough of family problems. The main thing I wanted to focus on in this blog wasn’t actually my stressful family, but is in fact this whole business of waiting.
Waiting seems to me to be something I constantly find myself doing. At present for example, I find myself waiting for university to start; waiting for summer to end; waiting for my publishers to get back to me; waiting for find a job; and waiting for my situation to become such as I can afford once more to move out of my Dad’s house and hopefully, live on my own. The irony – and indeed the great paradox of life – is of course, that with all this waiting for things to happen and to come together, I find myself gradually getting older and nearer and nearer the slippery precipice of old age. The older I get, the more I want to be young again; but the younger I am, the more I want things to progress so as I might settle into a situation where I don’t have the constraints of youth.
It’s thoughts such as these that have doubtless driven countless millions insane. It certainly feels sometimes as if it’s driving me that way.
It seems fitting then, that at a time such as this, I might draw some comfort from the words of one of my favourite authors of all time, Kurt Vonnegut. In his modern masterpiece Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut’s hero Billy Pilgrim embarks upon an odyssey through time as he is taken as a zoo specimen by an alien race known as the Tralfamadorians. One of the great anti-war books of its time, our hero Billy Pilgrim, finds himself develop a new concept of time as he experiences time as do the Tralfamadorians, living life in all moments of time, and not just the human concept of ‘present’.
To me, there is a great deal of meaning to be taken from Vonnegut’s work. For one, his dealing with the nature of time, and more specifically, the concept that time in itself is constant and that we exist in every moment of time, is one I like to draw some comfort from. Essentially, if we are to be the best we can be, and make best use of our time, it’s not merely a matter of having done good things in the past, or indeed good things in the future. More, the point I feel is to embrace each and every moment of living, and remember as we do so, the marker we are setting down in time – the marker that our existence has made on time, and also of course, the lives of others.
It seems then, that it’s no good my worrying about waiting, or not waiting, or indeed getting old. To be the man that I want to be I need to embrace each moment I live, and try to be the best person I can be in each and every moment of precious existence that is given to me.
If you haven’t read it already, I strongly suggest you all go out and read Slaughterhouse 5 – as much for its approach to the concept of time as anything else. To me, the book is a masterpiece, and easily sits in my top five books of all time. Unlike so many books that I’ve read in my short life thus far, it has a message to me that transcends the mere hundred or so pages of its content. It contains a message of hope; a message of being; a message of life.
Why worry about waiting for the future to come, when the present is so precious?
Until next time,
M.J.Ryder
