One excellent example of waiting is making a shiva call.

Most people don't know what to say when they try to console others, so they come to the shiva call and sit. Basically they wait until it's an appropriate time to pick up and leave after the shiva call, but this can take what seems like an endless amount of time.

Yet it is precisely that waiting during that extended period of time which is the action or the activity. People come to the home where someone is sitting shiva in order to wait.

It's not as if you're wasting time or waiting for something to happen. The activity that you are waiting for is happening right then. It's waiting. If you would do something else with the time you would not be waiting and you would not be carrying out accepted or required activity.

In this way it is much different from waiting for a bus, say, or for a friend to arrive in which you try to find an activity if possible to do so that you won't be just wasting the time.

Granted, at a house of shiva sometimes you do talk, sometimes even about important things and often people study mishnayot or something else especially between mincha and maariv and this is a fine and praiseworthy way to spend the time.

However, you can't depend on spending the time this way and in many cases the activity that you will be doing is the waiting.

And sometimes that waiting takes even more time than the amount of time that you spend waiting for the schnitzel to be served at a wedding, and it seems to be interminable if you don't know the people sitting at your table or you can't strike up a good conversation with them.

Sometimes this waiting seems as long as waiting for the moshiach.

Perhaps the only time that you wait longer is when a single girl waits for the phone to ring and it never does seem to ring when you're waiting. The expression "A watched pot never boils" is a relatively brief period of time compared to the time that you wait until the phone rings.