Just wait.

That’s what my mother said when I wanted to play in her make-up bag.

“You’ll be old soon enough,” she said, putting away her tubes of red lipstick and containers of pressed powder.

I didn’t understand why I had to wait. The grown-up world was mysterious and exciting, much more so than being a little kid who had to leave the room when adults were talking in low voices.

Just wait.

“Your face will freeze like that,” my mother said to me on more than one occasion. My face didn’t freeze with my tongue sticking out, but those crow’s feet and wrinkles did eventually show up, just like my mother told me they would.

Just wait.

That’s what my high school teachers told me when I questioned why we had to follow the outdated dress-code rules. How did the length of a boy’s hair or a girl’s dress keep them from learning?

When we got into the real world, our teachers said, we’d understand the reasons for these grown-up commands, and we could change the rules when we got to be adults.

Just wait.

That’s what I told my children whenever they’d misbehave. You’ll be a parent one day, and you’ll understand what it means to be at the end of your rope with 10,000 things to do and not enough time to do them. One day, I told them, you’ll understand.

Just wait.

That’s what we do when we go in for a checkup and the doctor tells us she needs to run a few more tests because something doesn’t look right. We wait for the phone call with words that will either put us on Cloud 9 or send us to the depths of despair.

The moments waiting are spent in either denial, agony or deal making – “Lord, just get me through this and I’ll be good forever.”

Waiting.

That’s where we spend most of our lives. We wait in long, slow moving grocery lines while playing mindless games on our cell phones to pass the time. We wait in bumper-to-bumper traffic, our anger growing with every annoying red light and every slow poke in the left-hand lane.

Waiting.

For that first kiss, our first job, our first child and especially the day we’ll retire. When that day comes, we tell ourselves, we’ll be on Easy Street, able to kick back, put our feet up and enjoy life. No worries, no work and no bills, we think, just rest and relaxation.

But not now because we’ve got kids in school, the car needs new tires and the water heater isn’t going to make it another six months. We believe our golden days are ahead of us or out of our reach, but if we can just wait out the next six months or the next few years, we’ll eventually end up free from aggravation.

Except during all those impatient moments, a quiet symphony plays out around us – an afternoon watching children dancing in the sprinkler, the give-and-take rhythm of family dinners or relaxing on the back porch, waiting for the sun to set.

So no more griping about waiting for the traffic to clear or thinking everything will be okay when that raise comes our way. No more gritting our teeth while waiting for the kids to grow up and move out. No more waiting for the good times or the right time.

Because while we’re complaining about having to wait, we’re missing out on what’s happening all around us.

And that’s life.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.