The tragedy of waiting...
I don't know what life will be like in other countries, but in Latin America and very specifically in Venezuela, people live daily waiting. Not only in squares or parks, but also in banks, supermarkets, bus stops, the street, in our homes. We hope that the person in charge of a ministry who talks on her cell phone with her friend about her plans for the night will attend us; we wait in line to buy food without the slightest hope that it will reach us; we wait in the emergency of a hospital knowing that life can go away in a second; we look forward to the miracle that never comes and will never happen, but we hold on to that idea, because they taught us that it is better late than never.
Because, if you do not perceive it, one of the tragedies of waiting, sometimes, is not knowing what we are waiting for or if what we are waiting for will come: the famous uncertainty of waiting. The other is the timelessness of waiting. There are moments in which our waiting has no limits, it is postponed daily, it is resized and even becomes infinite. We die without knowing what we were waiting for, we only live with the illusion that something will come and we patiently wait. As in Samuel Beckett's famous play, Waiting for Godot, where Vladimiro and Estragon stand firm, sustained by hope and self-deception, waiting for Godot who will never arrive.
If we check the portals of psychology, well-being or health, we will find thousands of works that tell us how we should joyfully assume the wait. In today's society, as a consequence of the stress in which the human being lives, we are urged to be patient, to wait for things to happen naturally, to comply with the times, without forcing or pressing things, and we are even encouraged not to look for them with the blessed phrase that "God's time is perfect". Keeping calm, letting flow, breathing, it seems are the mantras to lead a healthy life in this frenetic world.
I must admit with a certain shame that patience is not one of my virtues, I tend to be very impatient, and just sometimes I get tired of waiting. Personally, I try to be as punctual as possible so as not to make anyone wait, since I put into practice the saying "don't do what you don't like to be done". But in recent years I have lost the courage to be punctual or to do some diligence in any establishment, business, office, because the wait can be endless. In this ambush of history that we are living, Venezuelans can spend hours, under the inclement sun, to enter a supermarket, just for the simple fact of buying cheaper products. Today's Venezuelans get up early not because God is going to help them, but because they have to queue endlessly to take the transportation; because if they go to the bank, they still have to queue endlessly to get cash. In Venezuelan hospitals, people also queue to be cured, even though we know that in the end, it is to die.
If time is money, in my country we have wasted a great fortune. Here time does not advance, we are detained and in the worst case scenario, we walk backwards. Tragedy has the form of a waiting room, of a broken clock, of eternal darkness. As the poet Vicente Gerbasi said: "we come from the night and towards the night we go". Apparently, we cannot expect anything new or good from this moment we are suffering. Because, what do the cancer patients who don't get to get chemotherapy wait for; what do the political prisoners who don't have a date to get out of jail expect; the housewives what do they expect when they don't get the food; what do the workers expect when their wages don't reach them; what do we Venezuelans expect when we want this government to end? What are we waiting for? Nothing.
These days, I was amazed to see how a group of people, while queuing up to buy regulated products, decided to improvise, in the middle of the sun, a popular board game in Venezuela called dominoes. People waiting, laughed, played, shouted, made jokes. When I saw that I thought about how clocks stop, how an unoiled machine becomes paralyzed, how a car stopped for a long time becomes useless. I believe that in Venezuela we have resigned ourselves to waiting, even though we know, as in Waiting for Godot, that what we are waiting for will never come.
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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE
http://www.eluniversal.com/economia/35373/reportan-largas-colas-en-busca-de-dinero-en-efectivo
https://elcomercio.pe/mundo/actualidad/venezuela-largas-colas-comprar-alimento-fotos-noticia-486960
http://brujuladigital.net/reportajes/cientos-de-venezolanos-hacen-cola-frente-al-consulado-de-chile-para-obtener-una-visa-de-ingreso-a-ese-pais
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