Life on hold

This week, I spent a delightful hour...while on hold.
I needed to make an appointment with my VA primary care doctor outside of that agency's normally mandated frequency of once every six months.
So, I called the appointment number and was told that I would have to speak with a Triage Nurse. I was transferred to that number.
The rather officious sounding woman's recorded voice repeatedly assured me  my call was "important to the VA", but there were 20 calls ahead of me.
Then the hold music started.  Interrupted every half minute by the repeated assurance of the importance of my call..... and the eternal number of 20 calls ahead of me.
(The number eventually worked its way incrementally slow way down.)

"Well," I thought, "It's a good thing I'm not in any dire straits."

Then, I thought about that innocuous hold music.
 I wondered, not for the first time, what it must be like to be a musician in an orchestra who knows that her best work on the guitar, keyboard or trombone,will fade into obscurity of hold music.
How about the recording technicians, who take as much pride in their work as do the musicians?

That realization brought the thought: In a way, we are all on hold, laboring away, doing our best, providing the universal hold music for life.

Life is what happens when you're not looking.
Like the anonymous hold music musicians and technicians, we're all doing our best to be the best "we" that we can be.

Like that old Internet Irish blessing. We're dancing like no one is watching, and the musicians are playing like everyone is listening.

This is life on hold.

--Alan Batten for Unity of Charlotte