A Field Guide to Waiting Rooms, Revisited
One year later, the same chairs, a different patience.
Waiting rooms have not changed. What changes is what you are capable of doing while you sit in one, which turns out to be the real subject.
A year ago I wrote about the particular furniture of waiting - the chairs bolted in rows, the magazines nobody reads, the clock that seems to run slow on purpose. I promised myself I would revisit it once enough had changed in my own life to change how I sat in one.
It has not changed the chairs. It has changed what I am capable of doing in them - I read now, actually read, instead of performing the appearance of reading while watching the door.
Maybe that is the whole education a waiting room offers, delivered slowly enough that you only notice it in hindsight: how to be present somewhere you would rather not be, for exactly as long as it takes.
