On Waiting Rooms

There is a particular quality of light in waiting rooms. Fluorescent, usually, or the kind of daylight that comes through windows that haven’t been cleaned since the building was new. It illuminates without warming. It makes everyone look a little ill, whether they are or not.

I have spent a lot of time in waiting rooms. Doctor’s offices, airports, DMVs, the hallways outside important meetings. And I’ve come to believe that they are among the most honest spaces we’ve designed, because they make visible something we usually work very hard to hide: that most of life is waiting.

The suspension

We fill our days with motion and purpose, with tasks that generate further tasks, with the sensation of forward movement. But strip all that away — put a person in a plastic chair with a number in their hand — and the underlying condition becomes clear. We are, most of us, waiting for something. For things to resolve. For news to arrive. For a version of ourselves we haven’t met yet.

The waiting room simply stops pretending otherwise.

There is nothing so clarifying as being told to sit and wait. All the urgency drains out of you, and you’re left with whatever was underneath it.

What’s underneath it, often, is a kind of relief.

On doing nothing

We don’t have a good language for the value of waiting. We call it “wasted time” and apologize for it. We pull out our phones to prove we’re still productive. But there’s something that happens in enforced stillness that doesn’t happen otherwise — a slow surfacing of thoughts that can’t compete with busyness, an involuntary inventory of where you are and what you’re doing there.

The Stoics had a practice they called memento mori, remembering death, which sounds morbid until you understand the purpose: to remind yourself that time is finite and therefore precious. A waiting room is a secular version of this. For twenty minutes, half an hour, you are removed from the economy of productivity. You exist without justification.

That used to feel like deprivation. Lately it feels like a gift.

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I have a theory that people who are good at being alone are also good at waiting rooms. They’ve learned not to require constant stimulation, not to treat their own company as a problem to be solved. They can sit with the bad light and the old magazines and be, simply, present to the moment they’re in.

This is not resignation. It’s a kind of attention — the same attention you bring to a long walk, or to watching weather move across a landscape. Nothing is happening, and so everything is visible.

The number gets called eventually. You stand, you go in, time accelerates again. But for a little while, in the worst chairs, under the worst lighting, you were simply there, waiting, which is to say: alive in the most basic sense, in a room designed to make that unmistakable.