ArcaMax

Waiting rooms have become a wasteland. I travel it with the same promised oasis in my hand, catching up on emails or scrolling through social media. However, I still like to peek up and look around to see who else might have drunk enough from the fountains that allow us to forget about the desert around us.

As someone who lives in an actual desert and is underprivileged in melanin, trips to the dermatologist are part of the routine. After the cancer they found years ago didn't redevelop, exams went from every six months to yearly. That's enough time for a medical practice to get bought out, new products to fill the shelves, and new procedures to give the army of black-scrubbed assistants with immaculate skin even more things to do.

It had been a long morning catching up on emails, and the waiting room was a welcome space to breathe out and touch linoleum. Teens with their mom and a particularly stubborn amount of acne are regulars, but so are older men and women of my coloring, with the tell-tale scarring on their scalps and noses that details their lacking sunscreen habit.

Darting glances at others in a waiting room are within the expected parameters. Maybe even curt nods when the rooms fill up and you're forced to sit next to someone rather than give the polite one-chair distance. But here I was, longing for another bored person to strike up a bland conversation between us. How novel that we're coming up for air from our technology during something as mundane as a doctor's visit.

But the assistants pulled person after person out of the room in quick succession. When it was my turn, I was pulled into an anteroom with a large machine. A quip about the ominous machine was ignored by the assistant, who hustled me back out ... into the next waiting room. It was much smaller, more concentrated with people. I believe last time it was a cubby for the assistants, not a waiting room. I couldn't help myself.

"I guess it's a good sign we've made it to the second waiting room, eh? Next is the Thunderdome?"

Two of the four in the converted closet looked at me and chuckled. One of those went back to her phone -- rough crowd.

There's been commentary online about a lack of basic social niceties that serve as lube for the most mundane life tasks. But we become so adept at looking past one another. From grocery shopping to picking up coffee, why does the recognition of each other's humanity in shared spaces seem to have receded? Can we cultivate pro-social habits, even with those with whom we might never need to engage again?

In waiting rooms, we find ourselves in a peculiar pause -- a space where everyone has somewhere else to be but, for a moment, nowhere to go. Yet even in these liminal spaces, our humanity must be acknowledged. The person sitting next to us is no less natural for being unknown. Their story and presence deserve a nod, a smile or, at the very least, an absence of indifference.

Small acts -- like holding the door, making eye contact or offering a seat -- may seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But they're not. They are the threads of community woven from momentary recognition of shared humanity. They remind us that we are not just individuals navigating our separate paths but participants in a shared, collective experience.

These gestures are not about dramatically breaking down boundaries between ourselves and others. Instead, they are about softening the edges of our isolation, about choosing to see and be seen, even if only for a moment. It won't solve all our problems, but perhaps, with each small effort, we can stitch a fabric of civility that, when we're tested in bigger ways, will hold together. It starts here, in these ordinary spaces, where we wait not just for our turn but for the chance to see each other.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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