The Waiting Room

Just the other day I found myself in the waiting room of our doctor's office. A routine checkup, so nothing that provoked anxiety. As many a waiting room, the place is drab, neutral. It is a curious place to be, a waiting room, in this hectic world. It is a place where you have no choice but to slow down, relax if you can so convince yourself, and idle the time away, a sin it seems. The way people busy themselves reading articles they are not interested in, in magazines they would never subscribe to. Of course, now we have cell phones to make sure we make the best of every idle minute in those waiting rooms. And of course, there is an unwritten rule it seems, that you will not engage in conversation with any one else in the waiting room. No conversating, just waiting. I often break that taboo, much to the chagrin of my husband or whoever else may have the fortune to be there with me. The silence in a waiting room is like no other, punctuated with the obligatory rhythm of coughs, chuckles, whispers and yawns. The waiting room to me is a rather mundane but persistent reminder that a lot of life is waiting, it is just that we do not like to think about that, and maybe the reason we do not particularly like waiting rooms is because we have to do so much waiting as our lives unfold. We wait to be born, we wait to walk, to talk, to go to school, to grow up, to fall in love, to study, to work, to marry, or divorce, to get well, to travel, to publish, to eat, to laugh, to cry, ... the list is endless. In the daily rhythm of life, the waiting gets blended in with the rest of life, but step into a waiting room, and the jig is up. There you are, just plain waiting. The chairs in the room tell you to sit down, and well, wait. Time is weird, too, in a waiting room. It goes into suspended animation mode. You never really know how long you are going to be there. Fifteen minutes, or maybe two hours. You have no control. It is a total existential joke, and a bad one at that. Just look around you. Everyone has a sour puss expression. The only people that have fun at waiting rooms are children, even though it is made very clear to them they should just get bored to tears, which they often do, like the rest of us. Children will climb on the chairs, run around in circles, laugh, cry, argue, explore, and are a wonderful reminder that life should be about more than sterile waiting rooms. Children actually have encouraged some kind doctors and dentists to put toys in place for the children subjected to their waiting rooms.They should do the same for the adults. Install a slide for grown ups, maybe a place for tag or hopscotch, anything to get the stale air and stagnation out of these places. There are waiting rooms everywhere, it seems. Airports, train stations, bus depots, subways. We should make them more fun, and some places do just that. Because the way things still mostly are in waiting rooms, it puts into question the whole mystery of modern human existence and its tragic inability to make sense of it.