Why is the last mile the longest???

You appeared for that exam and the result was supposed to come on the internet after 2 months. As soon as you came out of the exam, you knew that you have to wait for 60 days.
45 days passed by without much effort. From day 46 onwards you started checking the results page every day.
Day 50 onwards 3 times a day.
By day 55 you were checking the results every one hour.
Day 58 the results page became your home page.
Day 59 you had glued your bums to the chair, left hand to the keyboard and right hand to the mouse.
Day 60 you almost went to the place where the server had been hosted for the results page.


You fasted one of those days as it was a festival... the whole day... you were not supposed to eat anything from morning 6 o'clock to evening 8. It was no effort to go through the whole day. But somewhere around 7 in the evening, you started feeling hungry. The last one hour was the longest hour of your life. And the time from 7:45 to 8 was crawling so slow that you almost pushed the hands of the clock to 8 o'clock.


You were supposed to drive down from Bangalore to Chennai (350 kms approx). The first 200-250 km were a breeze, after that you actually started cursing "why is Chennai not coming yet"... as you reached the outskirts of the city you became more and more desparate, traffic starts moving slower, signals turn red and the last few kilometers seem to take longer than the entire journey...


You participated in a 10k marathon... the last kilometer was the most difficult to pass...


You got engaged to him / her... the wedding was supposed to happen 1 year later, first nine months went by and as you got closed to the D day, time seemed to slow down and you were waiting so desparately for the day to come.

In all the above, and many more experiences of life, the one thing that seems to be common is that the end of any process often seems to become more difficult, lengthier than the process itself.
In all the above examples, the last mile of the journey was the longest.

Seen carefully, in all these cases, the process has not slowed down, its just that we become more and more impatient and desperation seems to set in. This desperation is what makes life difficult.
Like my teacher once said - "Desperation is the cause of suffering, drop desperation and you can transcend suffering."

I don't know what intellectual or sophisticated lesson I will take from this post, but I know for sure that I will maintain my patience and go through the entire process without any desperation... be it exams, results, journey or waiting for my own marriage :)