Waiting for Godot (well, Charles actually… But Godot sounded more interesting!)

I was wondering the other day. Wondering is something I tend to do a lot of. Well, this time my meandering mind was winding itself around the question of how much time I spend waiting.

Lots of us spend time waiting, especially in those traditional “waiting places” like the doctor’s, dentist’s or train platform; my musings took me to quite a positive place – surprising as that may seem considering the subject.

I was waiting for Charles. That’s the kind of waiting that I participate in most frequently. Each weekday after school I try to fill my time industriously as I wait for Charles to finish work in Achrafieh and come to collect me from my work on the Cornishe near to Manara (Arabic for lighthouse).

The traffic is always bad so I try to get down to the main road in time to leap into the car as he passes. As I was saying, I managed to get to quite a positive place with these waiting thoughts. I was contemplating all the places that I could be waiting and decided that things could be a lot worse; they could also be a lot better – but in line with my positive thinking today I’m not going there! While I waited I snapped a few shots of the shoreline beside me.

It wasn’t a particularly fantastic day weather-wise, just a usual spring day. Various people walked or ran on the wide pavement. Families promenaded with children scooting about in all directions. The human traffic was about a tenth of the crowds there are later in the evening or at weekends. Seriously, the Cornishe has a whole life of its own. I need to take more pictures and write about that some time.

Back to the wondering. I decided certain things: waiting helps you become more patient, I get jobs done at school that I don’t have time for during the day, you notice things you might never usually see, the fact that I wait for Charles and we share a car is good for the environment, and we get to spend a lot of time together as we struggle through the Beirut traffic to get home. On that positive note…