Waiting
At 6:32am on June 25th, the Moon was New again. While I may be posting this a few days after the fact, the theme has been on my mind for well over a week now.
The focus for the last cycle was Joy—and in that post, I contrasted my desire for joy with my persistent sense of anxiety. Through the course of the month, I recognized that while my perception of this is uniquely my own, the conceptual challenges are not. If there was a plot to a movie contrasting Joy and anxiety, there must be a lot of people this touches.
What is unique, though, are the circumstances that keep me sitting in this space.
This came into focus for me during last week’s heatwave. I was trying to balance humidity, temperature, and air pressure in an elegant dance of airflow to keep the space cool. I failed — miserably. I was so desperate for a solution that I began brute-forcing every metric: fans on high, cooling on maximum. But it was having the opposite effect. When I stepped back and really watched what I had wrought, I saw the problem. The heat was subtle and stealthy, but I was unleashing chaos to remediate it.
It wasn’t until I stopped that I noticed that one fan wasn’t doing what I needed at all. I moved it two feet, set the speed to low, and suddenly everything clicked.
Slow down. Don’t overthink the problem. Nudge the subtle changes first. Be patient.
Patience is a funny thing — like airflow, it’s subtle. Where are the timey-wimey lines between wasting time, lying in wait, patiently waiting, and evolving?
None of us want to waste time. Not many want to be Aaron Burr. And patience, unchecked, can drift into inertia. But waiting for the right moment and leaning into it — not with the reflexivity of lying in wait, but with the effortless flow of evolving — that’s where growth happens.
Over the past few months, I’ve increasingly realized that I have been Waiting for much of my life. That recognition brought the theme for this cycle.
I realized that I would save things, I would delay things, I would inhibit things because “it wasn’t time yet.” It was the pack-rat trap of saying “I may need this someday,” only to realize someday is today and I really don’t need that.
The same is true for meeting a moment. In the last post, I reflected on Australia six years ago, and right now I am eight years removed from the trip to Greece. Those moments arrived and I was ready for them. But have I always been ready for all the moments and never gave myself permission to see it?
There’s a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands” that’s always haunted me:
You spend your life waiting / for a moment that just don’t come
I always felt like I was waiting on the moment — as if it were the moment’s responsibility to come to me.
But I always glossed over the next line:
Well, don’t waste your time waiting.
A week or so ago, I was meditating, and a phrase came into my mind that struck like lightning: “Here is now”.
It reframed everything. I didn’t need to keep saving things for some future “someday.” It reframed the meeting of the moments of Greece and Sydney, my fraught relationship with time, and the tentative nature of my steps along the path of self-advocacy. It’s always been time. I have always been here.
So this cycle, I want to look closely at my relationship with Waiting. What moments have I delayed out of fear or anxiety? Which have I correctly deferred because I wasn’t quite evolved enough to make them successful? Some bits of evolution are too convoluted to just throw caution to the wind — but maybe I’m more ready for some things than I give myself credit for.
The companion song is again one I’m singing to myself — not in anger or regret, but in compassion. And maybe just a little impatience.
It’s all I can do, to keep waiting for you
Categories: Blog, New Moon
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