Essays

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 1 view

A waiting room is one of the few remaining places where a stranger's face isn't competing with a screen for your attention, and I think that's why they feel so oddly intimate — you notice things in a waiting room you'd never notice walking past someone on the street: the way a father's knee bounces, the paperback someone's read three times, the particular quality of silence between two people who clearly aren't speaking on purpose. I've had some of my more honest thoughts sitting in waiting rooms, not because the setting is pleasant, but because it strips away the usual excuses for distraction. No task to finish, no meeting to prepare for, nothing to do but sit with whatever you actually feel about why you're there. We've started filling even this rare unstructured space with phones, understandably, since waiting rooms are often anxious places and distraction is a mercy. But I think something gets lost when we do — a small, forced pause that used to teach us, whether we wanted the lesson or not, how to simply sit with an uncertain outcome for twenty minutes without needing to manage it.