I recently moved near Eastbourne on the south coast of England, which – thanks to its sizeable population of retirees and nursing homes – is sometimes affectionately known as ‘God’s waiting room’.
This made me chuckle when I heard it. It also got me thinking about life’s many species of waiting rooms: those funny little places where ordinary activity is suspended, control ebbs and anticipation runs free.
I’ve long had a secret fondness for 24 Hours in A&E, the documentary series that quietly observes life inside an NHS emergency department; there is something heartwarmingly chin-trembly about what happens when nothing is happening.
People wait.
For diagnoses. Treatment. Prognoses. News.
Yet in those strange suspended puddles of time, life’s mischief keeps sneaking in. Lovers tease. Children play. Friends banter. People who arrived shocked or frightened find themselves laughing.
Waiting rooms are an in-between sort of thing, and we humans don’t tend to like them. Mostly because we don’t like to feel we’re in-between sorts of creatures.
We like a convenient fiction of certainty, not a wibbly-wobbly wishwash of wondering.
One door has closed; another hasn’t yet opened.
And instead of passing in a molten flow, time pools around our feet.
We tolerate waiting rooms because of what comes next. But without realising it, we often create them ourselves, living our lives like a never-ending procession from one to the next, forever postponing our happiness or fulfilment till we’ve made it out of this one…
I’ll start living properly when such-and-such a thing happens: when I fit into those jeans. Find a new job. Buy my first home. Get my ducks in a row (and check none of them are secretly pigeons).
Or out come the dusty old ‘if onlys’: If only I had more money. A different family. Lived in another country.
If only I had more time – four clear hours and scalpel-sharp creative clarity – then I could properly write these essays.
Instead, I have 57 minutes and sixteen metaphors about fungi (now saved for another post!).
Yes, waiting rooms can sometimes feel a bit grim: the walls might groan with warnings about deadly afflictions, the Take a Break magazine might be from 1987, and there’s probably a nasty teat of chewing gum stuck to the chair.
But maybe the trouble isn’t the waiting; maybe it’s how easily we mistake it for an absence of living.
Which puts me in mind of a D. H. Lawrence line I’ve always loved: “You may eat your dinner as man alive, or as a mere masticating corpse.”
Perhaps the same is true of the waiting room. I can spend the intermissions of my life anxiously watching the door, waiting for it to open. Or I can remember that the cracked plastic chair under my bum is, inconveniently, where my life is happening right now.
Maybe that’s why I love those little moments in 24 Hours in A&E. The diagnosis may be terrifying. The test results might still not be back. Nobody knows what happens next or when they can go home to feed the cat. And we might be wearing those catastrophically inappropriate knickers we never meant anyone to see.
But still somebody teases us, makes us laugh or kisses a trembly hand.
Perhaps life’s waiting rooms are less like stagnant pools and more like puddles: temporary places where time gathers before moving on.
And there’s a reason kids jump in puddles.
