Listen to Jim’s 3-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/eqT5ONjFgto
or read his story below:
THE WAITING ROOM OF THE VANITIES
I am right here right now…here in an unaccustomed room sitting atop unaccustomed furniture surrounded by cloned and soul-deprived magazines and sales brochures and neutral wall hangings and lifeless crisscrossed carpet tiles and a genuine artificial potted plant…
How many other waiting rooms have I experienced during this awkwardly extended lifetime? How many more waiting rooms are waiting for me to wait within them? Just what is a waiting room?
I look around.
The unfamiliarity of this cubed space is intentional, I suppose. Was this room’s original designer considering the feelings and fears and hopes and lives of future temporary occupants? Or was the designer merely working quickly within budget and space restrictions to come up with something saleable and boss-acceptable?
What else weighs upon me in this special neutered space?
Well, it is silent. No unidentifiable music piping in, no large-screen-image device screaming for my attention and my wallet.
What else is missing?
There is no clock to remind me whether the system is on time or tardy or suspended. There is no intentional sound, just the hovering hum of air conditioning, the muted mutterings of people in the hallway. Just the sound of my own voices at conflict with one another.
Oh, and there is no mirror. That’s just as well, because whenever I pass by a mirror I am amazed at what I see. Just who is that old dude who is concealing my 22-year-old self?Inside I am young. Outside, there is something else going on—the aging process that does not permit me to cast a vote aye or nay. I am disenfranchised.
Now and again, another waiting room denizen visits, sits, stares at some palmed device, eventually exits.
What’s the good news in this room? There is no lock on the door. I can leave whenever. But I don’t leave whenever because that would mean having to re-start the process of setting up computerized appointments using computerized systems and computerized voices and triggering computerized reminder calls. I’ll just continue waiting, if you please.
I sit here, unaccustomed.
Maybe this is better than I imagine, this waiting room of the vanities. At least I am in-between dramas. Before I entered I was just a preemie. While I’m here I am cocooned and protected from other realities. In just a little while I will be released to the world, sadder but wiser—or happier but wiser.
This place is protective of me and my thoughts and all knowledge of the outer world. Maybe it’s a chapel of meditation and I just now realize it. Just in time to be summoned into the hallway for my next trek toward the unknown
© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed