While I Wait

My small ritual for those in-between moments while I wait has changed over the years. Those moments in the billing queue. Or as I wait for the milk to boil. Or for my daughter to show up during school pickup.

My current ritual is to refresh my email in HEY. Once I realise there's nothing in there, I refresh the NDTV website. I hate the news, and yet the futility of the task feels perfect in the moment. The anticipation that something might have changed triggers a quick hit of excitement, enough to steer me through the silence.

How did I land so badly?

I am trying to think now, and I can't even remember what filled those moments before I had my first smartphone. Music, maybe? Endlessly organising MP3s into folders. Or observing stuff around me. There were games, of course. Snake. Bounce. Small, with no context, background or "progress".

I even remember the joy of loading Orkut on the puny screen of my Nokia N73.

It all changed once I got my hands on a smartphone. Games changed. Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, and such. Social media apps killed the games. Facebook became the king. And once Twitter launched, there was no going back.

My only ritual then was to scroll through the Twitter timeline. The meaningless, timeless interactions on Twitter were a perfect respite in those fleeting, yet tiresome minutes. The timeline met all the criteria. And for all.

My interest in social media soon dwindled, and so did my ritual. I read more. RSS feed. Read-later service. I soon realised these are not ideal for short breaks. The fitting short posts are interspersed among the meaningful long ones. The triaging needs attention, and hence, it doesn't stick.

So I've landed on something compulsive that lacks any real purpose. That provides only hollow comfort. Those small games on puny screens once offered the real thing. Now there's not even a game or an app anymore. Just the pull. Just the refresh. Just the tiny thrill of maybe something changed.

Hasn't the mechanical act of refreshing been the ritual all along?