I rather enjoy waiting rooms.
Not for their wild entertainment; a typical waiting room usually has only an inaccessible television permanently stuck to a channel I have no interest in (CBS, for example) and a collection of magazines mainly regarding how to best arrange a home, plan a wedding or plant a garden for sensory enjoyment.
Instead I enjoy waiting rooms as they do not require me to do anything other than wait. Often I will assist in the waiting room’s purpose by intentionally leaving my phone in my car, in order to prevent me from using it as a distraction as well.
Some of my generation might think this is stupid — dangerous even — and perhaps it is. But if I indulge in a text message conversation (if one could ennoble it as such) or I check my e-mail, what would I miss?
I’d miss the enlightenment of staring at a wall.
Again, this may sound like lunacy to my generation. I understand we live in a society of quick distraction and instant connection where from our phones we can access Twitter or Facebook, checking up on our friends and honing our own self-propagandist skills.
Modernity chants, “One should never be bored or disconnected.”
The waiting room disagrees. Idle waiting not only allows uninterrupted connection with what the mind and body are doing, it reminds us that no matter how many obligations we have or people who might wish to talk to us, we still have to wait for someone else.
Waiting rooms humble modernity.
We live in selfish times, and are culturally used to being catered to. Few of us are in dire want, and in our society individual choice is valued above all else. So (run with me on this one) if crass consumerism is the practical enactment of this cultural value, lazy atheism can be seen as its spiritual end; “God” does not exist, therefore we are our own gods and we choose how we live.
And few of us want to wait ... let alone wait with — gasp — only our thoughts to entertain us.
Yet here I wait because I made an appointment to fit into someone else’s much busier schedule. As I stare at a stucco wall while an old episode of “King of Queens” drones in the background, I realize I am not my own god, the arbiter of all things Alex.
By purposely distracting myself, I would have missed out on such a quietly humbling experience.
So instead I feel my thoughts, emotions and imagination take hold, and I see while I am not my own god per se, I am free to choose myself — and only myself — without distractions, entitlement or expectation. It is freedom of choice in its purest form — not an external choice but an internal one.
What a shame society has not devised more ways to subtly coax people into reflection.
Alex prefers windowless waiting rooms and can be reached at alexander.petrusek@asu.edu