the waiting room

 

I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a single wonderful experience I’ve ever had in a waiting room. And this is sad because over the course of years I’ve logged in countless hours in these sterile, florescent-flooded environments, sitting in stiff chairs leafing through dated magazines while surrounded by strangers with solemn faces. I’m sure that someone has done a study on the cumulative hours the average person spends in waiting rooms, and I fear this number may add up to years of a person’s life. This is information I probably don’t need though, as I’m already a pretty crabby “waiter“.

I contemplated this whole “wonderful things rarely ever happen in a waiting room” phenomenon after having recently experienced an extended stay at a car dealership while my vehicle was being serviced. It dawned on me afterwards that while in a waiting room, we are usually intently focused on the resolution of one particular situation or dilemma, to the exclusion of all other things. We are waiting for the car to be fixed. Waiting for test results. Waiting for a verdict. Waiting to see the doctor, the teacher, the lawyer, the job interviewer. And just as we are told to turn down our cell phones while sitting in these rooms, we also turn down our internal receivers that allow anything to happen outside of what it is that we are waiting for. Wonderful things can’t possibly visit us as we are temporarily shut down. We’re busy waiting.

I wonder now, how often I’ve unwittingly placed myself in life’s waiting room. My bottom so firmly adhered to life’s sticky vinyl seat it may as well be super-glued down. Waiting for my name to be called. Waiting for resolution. Waiting for the thing I thought I wanted to have happen to happen. And all the while as I’ve watched the clock’s second hand marching along, and been hesitant to step out and get a breath of fresh air for fear my turn will come and I’ll be marked absent, I’ve missed the colorful parade of possibilities dancing down the street beyond the waiting room walls.

 

~Cynthia

 

“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.”

~Kahil Gibran