By Eric Le Roy
“Thou hast nor youth nor age, but, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep, dreaming of both.”
(Shakespeare. Measure for Measure)
There is a story about a postman who had been delivering the mail to a certain address for so long that he frequently chatted with the owner and had come to regard him as something of a friend. The two exchanged daily pleasantries, snippets of local gossip, and even a few personal details. At Christmas, there would be a small exchange of gifts.
But one day, the owner informed the postman that he had just come home from the doctor’s, where he had found out he was terminally ill. The prognosis was so grim that death was expected in just a few months.
Naturally, the postman was shocked, dismayed even, for the owner had seemed in good health. Downcast and full of compassion, the postman would enquire each day about his friend’s deteriorating condition. The report remained grave. As the days and weeks passed, the postman’s sympathy grew.
Until one day, several months later, it dawned on the postman that the estimated mortality date had come and gone. The owner, though still declaring himself living ‘on borrowed time’, appeared healthy, even robust.
The postman began to wonder if he had been misled. He soldiered on with his sympathies for another month, and finally had had enough. In a burst of pent-up frustration spilling over into fury, the postman shouted to the heavens, “When is this son of a bitch going to die?” Finally, feeling betrayed, cheated, and robbed of a valid expenditure of his time, the postman changed his route and came no more.
The postman’s problem was simple and had nothing to do with a lack of compassion. He just got tired of waiting. Had his friend jubilantly explained one day that a miracle cure had been found and he did not have to die after all, the postman would have exulted. But since that good news did not arrive, he reasonably expected the man to succumb. When, after what the postman was sure had been a fair amount of time, the man simply refused to do so, the postman was indignant. He wanted a result.
“Good things come to those who wait,” says the proverb, extolling the virtues of patience. But wait for what? Don’t bad things also come to those who wait? In a nutshell, how much of our lives do we spend just sitting there, standing there – waiting for something to happen? Waiting for a bus or shifting from foot to foot at the end of a long line in front of a museum at some overcrowded tourist spot. Waiting. And ‘the watched pot never boils,’ saith the knowledgeable peasant woman. Surely, even a condemned man awaiting execution at some point thinks, “Ok, let’s get it over with.’
And, like the vague ennui of a daydream without substance or purpose, or the unchanging view of the parking lot outside an office window, it becomes impossible to tell whether actual time is passing or not. A trance so deep that you forget who you are and would question whether or not you exist (until some modern crescendo interrupts the revery), except that the question is not askable because the universe is on hold; all questions are thus trapped in the stillness. If no other sound was ever made, you might sink into a special kind of atmospheric quicksand that does not suffocate but makes you forget. ‘My name was….My name…My….M…../…..”
Granted, we don’t often think of it this way because most of what goes on is trivial, and, anyway, in the end, something does happen. The sea gates open, the tide flows in, flows out. The Armistice is signed, or War is declared. The imagined bride says Yes or No. Yes, and the marriage ceremony is concluded. Cameras flash and people leave. Later, the divorce papers are signed. The old year ends. The era snuffs out. The century burns down. The millennium shrugs off a thousand years. So much of it is spent merely waiting.
The boredom of it all!!
And yet, as we near the end of our lives, we go forth with candles, looking to see if there is something we missed. Yes, something did happen; rarely were we given adequate time to prepare. And to think: all we seemed to do was wait. Now the roulette wheel is motionless, the air conditioner off.
I sometimes, in my wicked way, ask myself how much of my life I have spent sitting on toilet seats. At traffic lights. Waiting for the flu or a hangover to get better. Waiting for an epiphany. To see a sign. Crazy stuff, too. For example, if I added up every orgasm I have ever had, either with another person or my own clubbing fist, how much total time has that involved? How much time does a person of normal life expectancy spend wiping their ass or blowing their nose?
How many years just blinking their eyes? Wishing you were somewhere else? Wondering if life will get better. Waiting. Waiting (as Leonard Cohen wrote) for the miracle to come?
I worked in a bookstore once and happened upon a slender volume called “What I Have Learned about Life.” Wisely, it contained quotes from all sorts of people, young, old, and in between. The one I remember was from an 84-year-old woman, who wrote, “I have learned that days are long, but life is short.” Indeed. For that is the gist of it: we get held up constantly by one annoying situation after another, backed up by red tape, frustrated by late deliveries, belittled by interminable delays of one thing or another, and meanwhile, like a pickpocket in the soul, time is slipping away.
Should I do This or That? Should I ask her or not? How long before I ask again? And before you know it, 50 years have gone by. Fifty years of waiting for what was going on under your nose all along. And then the long wait for something to happen passes, it happens, whatever it is, and the aftermath sets in, the long memory and wondering what it was (for the past tense now dogs your flagging energy), waiting until that urge evaporates too, and you are pushed out into the garden by knowing nurses, amid the artificial English ambience and apple blossoms of convincingly colored plastic, where at last, with marble eyes, you wait for nothing anymore.
Of course, we can look at it differently and ask other questions. Waiting could be interpreted not as a period of emptiness, but as a yawning opportunity to meet yourself. Right there in the stillness of the brain’s synapses, galaxies of molecular separation, the silence of the wide waters, the stillness of endless deserts. There is a person in there, it could be argued, and that person is you.
After all the galactic collapses and subsequent lights, the blistering suns and empty moons, after the sucking syrup of black holes and their belated big bangs, after all of that one day came molecular YOU. A baby no less. As helpless as a kitten consigned to the river, there you were. After a billion billion billion years of waiting, there you were. Someone called ‘mother’ rescued you. So what to do with you?
Alive now, you were asked to wait some more. Can it be that there is always a deeply embedded element of silence in waiting, and we have become afraid of silence? Just as there must always be some kind of light – if not sunlight, then garish nocturnal electronically controlled seizures in glow-packed tube after neon tube in cities, or the glimmering of a screen – to block out the darkness? As you grew from an infant to whatever you are now, did the sense of waiting ever really dawn on you, rising to the question: What am I waiting for? And the noise. There must be noise to drown out the solitary confinement of not hearing a noise. Waiting for the noise to stop. Waiting for it to hammer the mind again. Stop and start. And a theatre that fills and empties every time you breathe.
You are a prisoner of human-conceived time, and therefore, despite your spasmodic maypole eruptions of godless liberation or your devout and Savior-permeated solemnities, you, who waited so long to be born, now wait to die. And all around you, Nature chants its ever-evolving orthodoxy, and strange things come flying, drilling into your flesh the fangs of their momentary lives and crushing catastrophes; they surround your head, gray halos of turbulence, and then, according to the hour of their hearts, they vanish, they retire in the dusk and watch you with the amusement of thugs.
Unsponsored, you keep waiting.
The wage of waiting to be born is waiting to die. In between is a flickering commotion, as of candles at a dinner party for the elite, or fertility dances in fields wanting rain, or plaintive exhortations in church darkness, which I have always tried to reconcile with my temples of worship: the station waiting room, the foggy bus stop, and a cell at the county jail. I wish for preservation. I ask to be allowed to live, to wait some more.
But death loves it, glad to be pregnant again; the gruesomely beautiful rebirth, long awaited after autumns of reflection and winters of stiffening carcasses and ghosts, as nature’s evergreen treegods and voluptuous witches and wizards go wild, flourishing. A million years and a dead Jeffrey or Jasmine mean nothing. They waited in the shelters of their brains, but there was never a destination. No bus anyway.
Just hellos and goodbyes and sundials and moments of passion surrounded by eons of forgetfulness, the casual frenzies of the common human mind. Or a stillborn baby, once roused to fetus form and then devoured by oxygen-withholding applications in the womb. The child who waited for birth, then sensed there was nothing, and no sense waiting, and so departed like a solitary, low-hanging cloud, adrift from the others, unraveling above an empty parking lot.
But somewhere, the long wait is over. It’s Springtime. Tourists come, the parking lots fill up again. Ferris wheels and roller coasters go round and round, and everyone is shouting and waiting their turn. It was just a matter of time.
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FUN FACTS:
1. Time Spent on the Toilet (Pooping or Sitting)
There’s a wide range of claims here:
Takeaway: Most credible estimates converge on 0.5 to 0.7 years (~6 to 8 months) of toilet sitting over a lifetime. The German study and Reddit estimate align well, while the 240 days (~8 months) estimate adds support.
2. Time Spent Experiencing Orgasm
The German study also estimates that an average lifespan (78 years) includes only 16 hours of orgasmic ecstasy . That’s surprisingly brief—less than a full day.
3. Time Spent Blinking
Blinking is surprisingly time-consuming when accumulated over decades:
Interpretation: Depending on method, lifetime blinking time ranges from ~1.6 years to ~7 years. The variation stems from differing assumptions—blink duration, wake time, blink rate. A midpoint of 3–4 years seems plausible for someone born in 1949, though a precise figure is hard to pin down.
Yours faithfully,
Artem Kovalev
