Waiting Room Observations circa 2016
I've struggled taking the time to post content over the last, let's face it, several years... My only child, now 13 months old, has taken up the majority of my time -naturally. Then tack on moving our family to a different country by sailing our boat down, preparing for that voyage, repairing what broke during that voyage, and starting a new life with all the paperwork required to do so... It's a lot. Oh yeah, and the pandemic. It's been a lot to deal with, and I'm sure most people feel they've had a lot to deal with over the last year. Regardless, I do enjoy writing, reading, and reflecting. Lucky for me, I came across some old notes while cleaning out my collection of books and journals.
This was from back in 2016 after we returned to the states from our South Pacific adventures. At the time, we were visiting my grandma, and on this day I had taken her to her doctor's appointment in Poway, something I hardly ever get to do because I have always lived so far from her. I was still buzzing with a passion for life, a drive to keep going, keep living, and these were the thoughts that came up while I was sitting in a waiting room in southern California, right in the middle of the fast-paced society I had left behind just a year earlier...
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I sit here in the waiting room of internal medicine at a Poway Hospital.
The room is spacious, and silence is broken by the incessant bickering of the chosen news channel coming from a television mounted above the reception counter. Then there is the concerned and confused questions of an elderly woman to her caretaker that breaks through the 2016 presidential election nonsense spewing from the TV.
I can't help but laugh at the contrast I witness in this plain, temper controlled room.
"Where am I? I don't know where I am." I hear an elderly woman ask the younger woman who helped her in.
"You're at the doctor's office, don't you remember falling the other day?" The younger woman is patient, and she compassionately answers the elderly woman's constant questioning.
"No I don't. I fell? Where am I?" She continues.
Just one case of many, I witness similar interactions continue as I wait patiently for my grandma to finish up her appointment.
A quick facebook check makes me laugh. How ironic that we as a human race fight and argue about what seems like everything, when each one of us will eventually be in the same plain temper controlled room, probably asking the same questions.
If we end up forgetting, is it worth it to fight your friends, your family, and your neighbors about petty things, about disagreements, politics and the election, etc.
I guess it's something to think about sometimes...