When waiting can be more accurately described as patience, it is good, which is what Rudyard Kipling meant in his poem entitled “If,” when he said we must “…wait and not be tired by waiting.”
When he wasn’t busy on his Mississippi Delta cotton farm, my father visited other farmers, and sometimes took me with him. In one grower’s office a plaque with a quote by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read, “A useless life is an early death.”