Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.

Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.

Today's tip is to figure out how to wait.

Being able to wait well can help make any situation feel like less of a waste of time.

So like almost everyone I hate waiting but sometimes it's inevitable. And sometimes it's in the service of cool things.

I'm thinking here of a trip I took to Yellowstone National Park with my older three children.

Yellowstone is known for its geysers.

Old Faithful is famous for being, well, Faithful.

It goes off every 91 minutes on average, plus or minus, about 10 minutes.

Other geysers have a much longer window of possibility.

My kids really wanted to see the grand geyser, which promised

to be grand, but the eruption window was sometime between 5 and 645 p.m. So we got to the Geiser at 4.55 on a frigid afternoon and there

we sat. I had my phone but almost no reception.

Plus, my hands were too cold to take the phone out of my pockets.

So how should I spend this uncertain quantity of time? In this case I chatted with the kids and I walked around,

partly to keep myself warm, but also because movement is a good way to make time pass while improving mood. It worked and of course

all time passes. Eventually the wait time was going to be over. The geyser erupted around 550 p.m. and it was

indeed spectacular. Grand even. Definitely worth the weight. We all wind up waiting sometimes for something.

On that same trip we got stuck behind a bison on the road.

He was waddling along at his own pace and no power on earth was going to move him.

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