The Power Of Waiting

If you are a first-time gardener, I wouldn't recommend that you start off by growing peppers from seeds. They take FOREVER to sprout!

I planted a few varieties of hot peppers over a month ago, and I was seriously about to lose hope for them. Then one day, I saw sprouts! It reminded me when I've tried growing bell peppers years ago. They, too, were slow to sprout -- so slow that I thought they weren't going to sprout.

I also had my kids plant lemon seeds over a month ago. I was about to give up hope on them, but just like with the pepper seeds, the lemon seeds started to sprout.

Then it hit me: one of the biggest secrets of growing anything from seed is patience. While some seeds could sprout in a matter of days, some seeds take weeks to sprout. One day, these little lemon sprouts would grow to be 12+ feet high and produce a bounty of lemons. These hot peppers would one day produce a bounty -- and enable me to make some hot sauce!

But if I had no patience, then forget about lemon trees and hot sauce. Heck, forget about any kind of success if I have no patience. Without the discipline of waiting, you wouldn't know what could happen in your life.

Waiting is hard, especially if you were never taught how to wait as a child. If you always got everything that you wanted exactly WHEN you wanted it as a child, then waiting would be a problem for you.

Recently, my family and I went to the Got To Be NC agriculture fair at the Fairgrounds. There were also carnival rides, and of course it's hard to bring your kids around a bunch of carnival rides that they cannot ride on!

My daughter was expecting to get on some of those rides -- not sure why, because neither I nor my wife said that she would get to go on those rides. While we were leaving the Fairgrounds, she started to quietly cry, because she wanted to get on some of those rides.

In the car, I gave her a lesson. Would she choose to enjoy these rides now, or wait until we go to the zoo in Asheboro? Of course, she said that she wanted to choose both. Then I had to explain budget: it's not in the budget to attend both. She needs to pick. So, I explained that it's expensive to attend just ONE ride at this carnival, and one ride lasts for one or two minutes. But for the same price that she would spend on a few one-minute rides, she could go to the zoo and spend ALL DAY there and do many more activities.

She finally realized that blowing money on immediate gratification at the cost of the glories of the zoo wasn't wise.

The older I get and the more mistakes I make, the more I realize how important it is to just wait. Going for immediate gratification would almost always cause regret, especially if it costed you something of true value. But you could NEVER go wrong with waiting.

There is one guy who comes to the garden center where I work almost everyday looking for Knock Out roses for sale. He refuses to pay full price for one rose, so he patiently and consistently comes to the garden center, looking for one of those roses on clearance.

Then one day, he saw me pulling some of those roses off the table to be discounted. I told him that if he came back later, they would be discounted. His patience paid off. He's an older, retired guy and he no doubt knows the value of waiting. One lesson he taught me could be summed up as this: "All you have to do is wait."

Would it surprise you that my wife is really the only girlfriend I had? Well...technically, she was the second, but she never considered my ex an actual girlfriend because we only dated less than two weeks! Whatever! Anyway, I never wanted to hop from girl to girl to girl. I wanted my first girlfriend to be my wife. I almost hit that goal if you consider my two-week girlfriend an actual girlfriend. I was content being single and was ready to accept a life of celibacy. Then in 2004, I met my wife online. Eleven years and two children later, I haven't had one regret about my choice in marrying her.

Good things come to those who wait, because those who wait avoid making stupid mistakes caused by haste. There's even a Bible verse that says, "Ignorant desire isn't good; rushing feet make mistakes" (Proverbs 19:2).

Even while in EMS, I saw that rushing had no place, not even if it involved a dying person. If you rush and screw up a procedure, say hello to lawsuits and new job applications. If you take your time and do things right, you could save the patient. But even if you lose the patient, at least you would have done things the right way. Of all the CPR cases that I had, I never once had to rush a patient to the hospital.

Just wait. Waiting won't kill you. Don't rush into any decision, and never feel pressured to have an answer right away. If you wait, you could find the right opportunities for you. If you rush, you would find yourself always making the wrong decisions.