While You're Waiting,
Life is Still Happening

Lemon Corner No. 12
28 August 2026

While You're Waiting, Life is Still Happening

There is a peculiar habit we humans have.

We divide life into two categories:

The important part and the part before the important part happens.

Before the promotion.

Before the relationship.

Before the business works.

Before the money comes.

Before the children grow up.

Before we finally become the version of ourselves we have been imagining.

So we wait.

And wait.

And occasionally refresh things that absolutely do not need refreshing.

Then one day, we realise something slightly inconvenient:

The waiting was life too.

That Tuesday afternoon when nothing remarkable happened?

Life.

The coffee you drank while answering messages?

Life.

The drive home.

The stupid joke that made you laugh harder than it deserved.

The five quiet minutes before everyone needed something from you again.

All of it counts.

We are very good at celebrating beginnings and endings, but most of existence happens somewhere in the middle.

And the middle rarely has balloons.

It looks ordinary.

Sometimes painfully ordinary.

Laundry.

Emails.

Dinner.

Traffic.

Deadlines.

A plant growing one suspiciously slow leaf.

Yet these are the hours that eventually become the years we say went by too quickly.

Maybe that is why we should stop treating ordinary days like the waiting room for a better life.

Of course, have dreams.

Make ridiculous plans.

Chase things.

Build things.

Change your mind and start again.

But while you are waiting for the big thing to happen, look around occasionally.

There might already be something worth keeping.

A conversation.

A routine.

A favourite chair.

A friend who sends nonsense at exactly the right time.

A quiet evening where nothing went wrong.

Not every good moment announces itself.

Some of them barely make a sound.

And perhaps happiness is not always reaching the next destination.

Sometimes it is noticing that you were alive on the way there.

So whatever you are waiting for right now, wait if you must.

Hope for it.

Work for it.

Be impatient occasionally—we are human after all.

But don’t put your whole life on hold.

Eat the cake.

Take the photograph.

Make the joke.

Go somewhere for no particular reason.

Enjoy Tuesday.

Because life is not beginning later.

It has been happening this whole time.

— Bee 🍋