The Weight of Waiting

I once sat on a bench in a train station in Leeds for three hours because I had missed my connection and the next one wasn’t until dusk. At first, I was frantic, checking my watch and pacing the platform. But somewhere around the second hour, the noise of the station faded into a dull, rhythmic hum. I stopped looking at the departures board and started looking at the people. There is a specific kind of solitude that settles over us when we are in transit, a state of suspension where we aren’t quite who we were when we left, and not yet who we will be when we arrive. We become ghosts in our own lives, untethered from our to-do lists and our anxieties. It is a rare, quiet grace to be caught in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a bus or a train that feels like it might never come. Do you ever find yourself grateful for the delays that force you to simply exist?

Keith Goldstein has captured this exact feeling of suspension in his image titled Bus Stop. It is a beautiful reminder that even in the busiest city, we all have moments where the world slows down just for us. Does this stillness feel like a burden or a relief to you?