I have spent a considerable portion of my adult life sitting in chairs that belong to someone else, in rooms designed to be forgotten. Waiting rooms. The ones in hospitals that smell like recycled air and quiet dread. The ones at the DMV with their flickering overhead lights and numbers that seem to count backward. The ones outside surgery suites where the clock on the wall becomes the only thing you trust, and then stops trusting yourself.
We don’t talk much about waiting as a practice. We talk about productivity, about making the most of every moment, about not wasting time. But waiting — real waiting, the kind you cannot hurry or negotiate — that’s a different country entirely, and most of us arrive there without a map.
I was in a waiting room not long ago, sitting with a family from our congregation while a surgeon worked on someone they loved. There was nothing I could do except be there, which felt both insufficient and, I think, exactly right. I’ve learned over the years that presence is not nothing. But I’ve also learned something else: waiting rooms have a way of stripping you down.
You can’t perform in a waiting room. There’s no agenda to manage, no impression to make. The magazines are always three months old. Your phone eventually feels obscene. So you sit, and you breathe, and if you’re lucky — or perhaps if you’re paying attention — something in you goes quiet. Not peaceful, necessarily. Just quiet. The noise you carry around all day like a coat you’ve forgotten you’re wearing finally gets set down somewhere.
I wonder sometimes if waiting is one of the few remaining places where we are forced to be human in the old sense — contingent, dependent, unable to fix what is happening on the other side of a closed door. There’s a humility in it I don’t always welcome but have come to respect.
Faith traditions know this. The Psalms are full of waiting. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits. Not a passive waiting, but a taut, leaning-forward kind — like a person standing at a window watching for someone to come down the road.
I don’t think waiting rooms are wasted time. I think they are, in their bleak and unglamorous way, formation. Something gets worked in us when we cannot move, cannot fix, cannot skip ahead. We are reminded of our actual size in the world, which is smaller than we usually let ourselves believe.
And somehow, in my experience, that smallness is not the worst thing. Sometimes it’s the beginning of something honest.