THE WAITING PLACE

What are you waiting for?

Waiting  is such a strange state.
It takes us away from our normal world and regular activities, placing us in a holding pattern, a limbo state.

We spend much of life waiting for life to happen.

We have special rooms designed just for waiting.
We sit quietly waiting for appointments in offices, procedures in hospitals,  turns at the counter or the window, news we are expecting, and impending events--we wait and we wait...

Waiting takes up much of our time.

And what do we do while wait?
We read our books while waiting for our financial planner, our lawyer, or our next business meeting.
We write emails while waiting for the movie to start,  doors to open, the check-out line to move.

Sometimes waiting is happening against the backdrop of life marching forward.
We wait on our loved ones to return home, for the baby to be born, for the much needed vacation to start-- while in the meantime we go about our routine activities.

Faith Wilding writes about  everyday-everyman-everywoman waitings --all the various ordinary waiting experiences we suffer or enjoy -- from infancy to adulthood, and all the childish hopes and teenage angst in between--in Waiting: a Poem.

Waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . 

Waiting for someone to come in 

Waiting for someone to hold me

Waiting for someone to feed me 

Waiting for someone to change my diaper

Waiting . . .

Waiting can be a wishing for or a hoping against --  we can be waiting for our ship to come in or hoping the other shoe does not drop.

What are you waiting for?

Waiting can be an eternal hope-- as we wait on divine promises.

What are you waiting for?

I have been waiting during the last days of 2013 and these first days of 2014-- my father has been in the hospital two times in two weeks.
He is still here.

We have waited for nurses and techs to come, for procedures to happen, for reports to be given, for beeps to be turned off or turned on, and tubes to be connected or disconnected, for food, for news, for family members ... we have waited...

 In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop captures this waiting room experience from a child's view and takes it beyond to a dream state. After hours in the ICU waiting room with my dad, this poem begins to capture my thoughts.

...It was winter. It got dark

early. The waiting room

was full of grown-up people,

arctics and overcoats,

lamps and magazines.

My aunt was inside

what seemed like a long time

and while I waited I read

the National Geographic

(I could read) and carefully

studied the photographs:

the inside of a volcano,

black, and full of ashes;

then it was spilling over

in rivulets of fire... 

Dr. Seuss approaches waiting differently. He considers waiting  to be  a useless and unnecessary activity  as we venture out into the world. In Oh, The Places You'll Go!,  he warns against arriving in this Waiting Place.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come

or a plane to go or the mail to come,

or the rain to go or the phone to ring,

or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No

 waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting...

He instead suggests that smart, ambitious folks make things happen along the way to avoid the waiting and staying.

 Click here to read  The Waiting Place by Dr. Seuss.
 Click here to  read the complete text from which it is excerpted, Oh the Places You'll Go.

Finally, there is the collective waiting, our universal, hopeful waiting for better times, a better world--for a soaring of intentions, and miraculous implementations of peace and goodwill.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem, I Am Waiting, first published in 1958 in A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems,  still sings out our social/political waiting, our national/ global waiting-- our human waiting.

...and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder 

and I am waiting for someone

 to really discover America 

and wail

and I am waiting   

 for the discovery

 of a new symbolic western frontier

  and I am waiting

  for the American Eagle

 to really spread its wings

 and straighten up and fly right

 and I am waiting...

What are you waiting for?

How do you wait?

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

When was the last time you waited for an appointment, an event or occurrence, a person or condition?

What did you do while you waited?
How did you wait?
Did you wait in a waiting room or go about your normal activities while you waited?

The following poem is an excerpt from a longer poem I wrote in the fall of 2009, Waiting for a Flu Shot:

...Waiting

gives an opportunity

to take off the burden

and weight

of going nowhere.

Waiting

forces a stillness

unlikely

in the river

of rushing

forward.

Waiting

calls us

when we just don’t  have

the time

when we just don’t hear

the time...

Write your own  poem about a waiting experience.
You may want to describe the place where you waited, your feelings, or what you did while you waited.  You may want to be literal or metaphoric.