Solitude at the Barbershop

Learning How to Wait in Line

Of course you have taken a number, sat and grazed upon tattered magazines, estimated the time it would take for each person to get their hair cut. The TV has Kelly Clarkson, or Drew Berrymore, or some gameshow you don’t care about with a minor celebrity you don’t care about. Or maybe you went to the other barbershop, the one with golf on TV, and they offer you coffee or water. The leather couches are worn, but soft. It smells slightly sterile, but also cool and concrete.

Either way, you wait. You wait on the coquettish hairdresser that flirts like a barista. When in reality, that is just called being nice, polite.

Do you get upset at the time investment spent in the waiting area. If it took an hour, do you have the patience to sit around and wait. Have you ever passed that sort of time without getting angry? Without mindlessly scrolling on your phone?

Could you await test results that aren’t a death sentence, but definitely an utterance? Can you be ok knowing that God will remind you of your mortality? What do you do in the meantime?

Or to be less serious, consider times when you are driving and notice the small impatient acts of others rolling through stop signs. They get into turn lanes early, speeding past when lines are still solid. No one merges like a zipper through traffic even though that is more efficient.

The problem is that these small examples of minor misanthropy or easy ignorance aren’t grave. They are annoyances, but no one often gets hurt. You may be heated in the moment, but you should get over it quickly. The issues aren’t that these are bad people.

You and I are both guilty of these things too. The penalties of impoliteness are minimal.

The issue is not being settled enough to wait quietly. To take turns or share. You never quite got it when you were meant to sit criss-cross-applesuace.

I have made it an effort to treat waiting as adversity-lite. Minor inconvenience in which I take care of some things I always swear to do when I have time: flipping through links of articles I meant to read, to text back a family member, catch up on an e-book, sort emails too. Other times I see if I can reasonably sit and be still for a few minutes and be comfortable.

Maybe it is the military in me; waiting is half of the equation.

Have you watched a single cloud move across the sky?

Maybe try to do incorporate some of this into your life, otherwise you are wasting time. You had to wait anyways. The wasting is your choice.

See what five minutes really is, to watch the second hand make five full revolutions. Could you do that for an hour?