One of my rituals for each new year is to choose a word to influence me for the year.   My word for 2011 is EXPERIMENT.   To support my EXPERIMENTAL focus, I commit to post the results of a new experiment each Sunday of this year.

More than three years ago I started this blog.   My very first post was about waiting.   Based on my blog stats, this is still the most frequently visited, pinged, shared and Stumbled-Upon post I’ve written.   I guess we all need gentle reminders about patience, eh?

Over the past couple of weeks my family and I have had a lot of opportunities to hone our waiting skills.   I embraced some of those opportunities.  Others… well, let’s say I embraced them as someone else’s opportunity :).  Once I got over the initial shock of why we were all in a hospital ICU waiting room, I DID experiment with paying closer attention to how I and others waited.

Here’s what I noticed:

1. Even though kids often get a bad rap for being IMpatient, at least they’re willing to ask for help AND be honest about their impatience.  I’m telling ya, there were MANY times I wished I could have crawled  onto someone’s lap and color.
2. There are people who like to talk while they’re waiting and people who don’t.  I’m thinking we should have the option of wearing little color coded tags in waiting rooms.  So we can flock toward our own kind – or at least have the choice of changing seats from time to time.
3. While I’m mentioning the whole color coding thing,  maybe a monitor would help, too ~ at least a neutral remote control commander.  I wish there was some kind of completely neutral TV options, but I guess there’s even someone who’d could be upset by those Diamonique things on QVC.
4. And,  just like in restaurants,  some people make better waiters than others.  These people seem to innately understand that they are not the only person in the universe whose heart is breaking; they get that every one has his own boundaries – which need to be respected;  if the TV bothers them, they move to a part of the room where it won’t;  rather than complain about the old magazines/newspapers,  they bring their own  AND LEAVE THEM ; and they don’t leave their frightened kids in an ICU waiting room alone -PERIOD.

Here’s what I concluded:

• We all do the best we can;
• We all do the best we can; and
• We all do the best we can.