The thing about waiting
On the kind of waiting that costs us something.
“Choosing not to act, over and over, while everything in you says otherwise.
That's the hard and necessary thing.”
There’s a version of waiting that is genuinely passive, where something is set down and perhaps forgotten about, and whether it comes back up stops mattering.
But there’s another kind, a harder kind of waiting, where it’s necessary and really difficult to ride out. The kind where we care very much, and are choosing every hour or so, not to do anything about it. Because we know that doing something active to reduce this kind of waiting isn’t the right move, and we’re holding to that knowledge while everything in us is saying otherwise.
This kind of waiting is exhausting, because sitting back takes more out of us than stepping up and acting on it would.
The kind that costs something
I have a dynamic in my life where this kind of waiting is necessary, and has been for a long while. The other person is choosing space and only engaging where engagement is unavoidable. The waiting and the space are not at all comfortable for me. My instinct is to reach, to explain, to clarify, to fix, to ask how they feel and what they’re thinking, and share my feelings and thoughts too. But the thing I have to do, over and over, is notice that instinct and choose not to follow it.
If you have a situation like this in your own life, you know the instinct comes from a real place. From love and care, and wanting things to be easier and more complete. But the kindest and most generous thing we can do is to stay in our own lane, be present and available, and trust them to find their own way through.
The difficulty is that this kind of waiting looks and feels like doing nothing. We’re living our ordinary life, going to work, eating dinner, reading or watching something at night, while quietly managing an enormous and overwhelming amount of internal noise.
It’s hard to sit with that level of hurt, discomfort and fear. But we need to do it, because the other person’s process matters more right now than our need to resolve the discomfort.
What we do instead
I’ve had to learn, slowly, that the impulse to reach under pressure is usually for me rather than the other person. Sometimes it’s anxiety wearing the costume of care. Sometimes the most caring thing is to sit still and wait.
This is a practised and difficult skill, and we often fall short along the way.
What helps is having somewhere to put the energy. Movement. Small tasks that belong entirely to our own lives. Conversations with people who are genuinely available. Investing time in our own interests. Anything that reminds us that we are people with hearts and thoughts and lives that exist independently of the thing or person we’re waiting on.
What doesn’t help is looking for evidence. Looking for signals that will tell us which way things are going, so we can stop waiting and start responding. This feels like information-gathering, but is usually just a way of side-stepping the hardness of not-knowing.
Sitting with the ambiguity and staying available, while continuing to live our own life, is the right thing. It’s just a shame it’s also the hardest.
What it actually is
Waiting is an act of faith. The kind of faith where we decide that the situation, the other person or thing, deserves more than forcing a resolution before it’s ready. We can’t rush what needs time to grow.
It does cost us a lot though. Real waiting asks us to feel something we don’t want to feel, and to accept something we feel could be better and different if we just did something about it.
On the other side of this waiting, if we come through, there’s something real either way. We didn’t collapse. We didn’t push. We held steady while something may or may not have been resolved.
That waiting with faith and grace is what steadiness actually looks and feels like. Messy on the inside, but building a capacity for calm with each occasion we’re asked to sit and wait.
Three things to try.
1. Name what you’re doing.
The next time you’re in a period of active waiting, try saying it plainly to yourself: I am doing a hard thing. I am choosing not to act when everything says to. Naming it as effort is more honest than treating it as passivity.
2. Check the impulse.
The next time you feel the urge to reach, check, or follow up on something that isn’t yours to push, pause for ten minutes first. The goal isn’t suppression. Just see whether the urge changes shape when you give it a moment.
3. Find your anchors.
Make a short list of things that are genuinely yours, regardless of how any particular situation resolves. Things that belong to you no matter what. Return to that list when the waiting gets loud.
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‘Becoming calmer. A practical guide to feeling steadier, and helping the people around you feel the same.’