Few weeks ago, I was hanging out with friends after work. After we had our dinner, we were walking towards train station to take our train home. We were about to board to the same train too. I saw that our train was on the platform and just about to leave. The door light was blinking, which means a warning for passengers not to rush in otherwise they might stuck because the door is about to close. I turned to him and asked, shall we run? And guess what, his answer surprise me.
He told me, let’s wait for the next one, and asked me back whether I always run when I saw my train is about to leave. Why don’t I just wait for the next one?
Well, I have my reason. In Singapore, the train interval is not so bad, compared to Melbourne when I was a student back then. In Melbourne, peak hours interval was around 10-15 mins and the off-peak interval was about 30 mins, and also depends on which line too. While in Singapore, certain line may have less than 3 mins interval during peak hour and about 7 mins during off-peak.
Anyway, I’m not going to discuss about the train scheduling here. 🙂 let’s leave it to the land and transport authority.
What I’m trying to point out is do we run for our “train”? I’m drawing an analogy between chances or opportunity in our life with train/bus.
Sometimes we had situations when asking us, do you want to take this opportunity or, do you want to wait for the next one. I’ll share one of story from my friend which has similar situation as this.
After graduation, some friends and I was planning to look for work abroad. We were planing our trip, documents and all necessities. But our plan didn’t work out so we went back empty handed. We decided to find some experiences and save some money to retry it later.
Some of my friend whom went together on that trip, decided to not pursue it anymore. Meanwhile I had my chance to study my post grad. After I completed my study, I heard that one of my friend has found work in that country. He shared his story with me that it wasn’t easy in the first place but he was patiently wait for this chance. He applied many jobs, had interview, failed and learned from it, submit more applications and finally he got what he want. He missed many “buses” (job interviews), he told me he had one in mind but he just tried everything that suit his skills on the first place.
I know that story maybe too brief to stress out that sometimes waiting is worth to do. And another point we can learn from it was persistence. I admire his persistence to keep trying until he get what he want.
I feel that waiting and persistence along it may also give us some time to think, whether our goal is what we truly want. In my friend’s story, he tried any other thing too while he was waiting his dream job. And in the end, he got it.
We can use this approach when facing some problems too. This reminds me of one of the chapter in Ajahn Brahm’s book. He stressed that usually if we are patient enough to wait, sometimes the solution of our problem will come to us.
To conclude, are we patience enough to wait? That’s the question I often ask myself.
Note on the post: I’m starting to notice that some of my posts are started from my experience with my friends. Thanks friends.
