Notes From the Waiting Room

Fear, Trembling, and Uncomfortable Chairs

Photo by Edwin Chen on Unsplash

My father has diffuse B-cell lymphoma. We are preparing to begin a treatment (called CAR-T) that uses the patient’s immune cells to fight their cancer. The journey to this moment has been intense and detailed. He spends hours at a time receiving chemotherapy, fluids, and medicines of every type and description. Some weeks, we are in doctors’ offices three days a week. As such, we live in waiting rooms.

That’s the modern condition: not war, peace, crisis, or calm, but waiting. We wait for meaning, clarity, and the next diagnosis. Life is no longer lived; it’s queued for.

The décor of the waiting room is neutral: beige walls, soft lighting, and a stack of magazines you’d never read in any other circumstance. A television is tuned to something bland enough to ignore. It’s designed to soothe, yet the calmness carries a kind of menace. Nothing happens, and that’s what unnerves you.

Kierkegaard would have recognized it immediately. The waiting room is the spatial expression of dread. You are suspended between possibilities. You are not yet condemned, but you are certainly not free.

The old philosophers wrote of thresholds and transitions, of moments that split the self open. The modern self is stuck in the prelude. No catastrophe, no catharsis. Just the same terrible chair and the same half-hearted optimism: Maybe this time, it will be fine.

What are we waiting for? News, mostly. From doctors. From bosses. From headlines. We are a species trained to expect pronouncements. We refresh, we reload, we scroll as if some message might arrive to tell us who we are and what we should do next.

The message never comes. Still we wait.

You learn things in the waiting room. You learn how many people talk just to hear themselves. You learn how many fidget. You learn how the self, deprived of distraction, begins to decay, not all at once but in small humiliations. You notice your hands. You regret your socks. You become aware of your breathing, which is never quite right.

There is no heroism in the waiting room. There is no story. There is only time, thick and unusable, and the slow undoing of whatever confidence you brought in with you.

Beneath it all, a truth stirs: that the waiting is the story. That all this trembling, all this stalled movement, all this breathless anticipation is life, disguised in the costume of its opposite. We thought the waiting room was what came before. But no. It is the only thing.

Kierkegaard again: “Anxiety is the possibility of possibility.” To wait is to stand in the presence of what might be. It’s what we do when we haven’t given up.

This means that even now, especially now, we wait, not because we are weak, but because we still hope for something to come.