You’re waiting in a long checkout line at the grocery store. You look down at your cart and you count about 12 items. The three carts ahead of yours hold well over 20 items each. You look over to the next register and there’s one woman checking out.

You make your move and you’re right behind her. Suddenly, she pulls out a wad of coupons from her pocketbook and fumbles through the pack until she finds the one that she wants.

“Sorry, Ma’am,” says the cashier. “This is for the two-pack of paper towels, not the four-pack.”

“That’s not what it says in the aisle,” says the woman. “Go back and see for yourself.”

The cashier picks up the phone. “We need a price check on the two and three packs of Bounty paper towels in aisle nine.”

So, here you stand waiting and waiting and watching shoppers from the line you had been in before rolling their carts out the exit door.

The woman was wrong and now she’s upset. “I’m not paying full price. Take it off the bill and put it back.” You wait some more unhappy time while the cashier removes the price of the towels from the woman’s bill. You leave the store in total frustration.

According to an article written last week by Christine Rosen in the Free Press, “Americans are more impatient than ever — and it’s affecting everything from our waistlines to our relationships.”

Everything we do is fast. We eat fast food. We want the fastest internet, and we like fast action movies with car chases and fiery explosions. But then real life puts up “Slow Down” signs. At the stores, we wait in lines. In local street driving we get stuck in traffic jams. On the turnpike, the left lane is closed and we have to drive 20 miles under the speed limit through the work zone.

Waiting for anything makes us anxious and even angry, not like when we were kids and the two weeks before Christmas we waited for that perfect morning for that perfect gift. Then, we waited for summer to come to get out of school. We had no smartphone to check texts or emails like we do now when we have to wait, and yet waiting back then never seemed more trying on our nerves than it does now.

Rosen writes, “As life gets faster, we have become more impatient about everything, including the interactions of daily life.” She discusses the life of a monk. He waits his entire life to hear the voice of God speak to him in his time of solitude. There are no distractions in a monk’s life. He spends every waking minute taking a journey inward, to understand himself at the deepest source of his being. He becomes a master of patience and listening, two things modern society prevents us from achieving. He loves the anticipation of that moment when God will be present. It’s the journey that matters more than the destination that ultimately defines the monk’s commitment to his purpose.

For us, the journey takes too long. We’ll hop through a red light and save a few minutes just to get to a ‘Slow Down’ sign at the long line at Starbucks.

Rosen says that we used to enjoy planning and waiting for vacations more than the actual vacations. Anticipation for something good to come was exciting. Now we see anticipation as a delay. We don’t want to wait for the vacation. We want to go right now.

She says we prefer reaction to deliberation. We’d rather get advice from a program with a panel of talking heads telling us who to vote for president rather than take time to investigate the facts ourselves on where the candidates stand on all the issues. They make up our minds for us, and we’re just fine with that.

Waiting can be a virtue. A young couple anticipates the birth of their first child, and given months of time, they plan everything from the baby’s name to the color of the paint for the nursery. When someone we love is going to die in the near future, we take time to understand how we will need to cope with life going forward without that special person.

As we grow older, we don’t wait for something to happen. Instead, we freeze frame an afternoon that we spend with a friend; we sing out loud in our cars in a traffic jam as the time goes by. We embrace the moment.

Time affects every breath we take. We hear the expressions: “Wait a minute, please.” or “Be there in a second.” The truth is that a minute is too long and a second always means more than that.

A long wait at the doctor’s office forced me to have both anxiety and reflection. I sat for a 3 p.m. appointment until 4:45 before I saw the doctor. During that time, here’s the conversation I had with myself.

“Geez, I rush to get here on time just to have to sit here for an hour and 45 minutes. It’s hurry up and wait!” said my mind.

“Yeah, but look at that man standing over there. He cannot walk without leaning on his wife,” said my heart.

“So, I could be home by now,” said my mind. “I got a lot of things to do, you know.”

“Think about this,” said my heart. “There are patients here who look worse off than you. They must need more time with the doc, and you’re worried about not having time to do a few things at home. Time is something these patients crave. They want another morning to see, another day full of moments they can cherish.”

I drove home that evening not caring about the tasks I had to do. Sometimes we need an experience when a “Slow Down” sign reminds us what a privilege it is to be alive.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com