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How to Care for Yourself in the Waiting
There will always be a part of you that reaches toward what might one day be.
If you think back to the moments you feel most nostalgic about, most sunken-hearted to realize have passed, you will often find that they are not the milestone moments that summed up that chapter in your life, but the quiet hours that actually defined it.
Your favorite song, and how it sounded, and where it brings you to listen to those verses again. The little routines you established for yourself. The little corners of the world that temporarily became home, and the people there with you. The ones you found joy with in the empty hours, in the smallest and most unsuspecting ways. That is the essence of what would ultimately define that era of your life, that made life actually feel lived.
It is easy to get trapped inside the illusion of constant forward-thinking.
To think that if our eyes do not remain fixed on the horizon at all times, we will never go anywhere. To an extent, that is true. But what is also true is that if we only think of our lives as a series of things we’re trying to get to, and then periods we have to endure in order to arrive there, we often come to find that the majority of our days are overshadowed by a kind of emptiness we can’t always describe or understand.
We look to those benchmark moments—going back to school, landing the job, stumbling upon someone we come to care about in so many different ways—often as a way of escaping discomfort. The kind of discomfort that has little to do with the fact that we are still in-between where we have been and where we are going, but is actually an unmovable part of being human. The kind of discomfort we have to refine our attention to embrace and then become discerning about.
There will always be something to worry about, something that is undone or unfinished.
There will always be something that is not quite yet, or not all there, or close but not close enough. There will always be something within that realm because there will always be a part of you that is open and hungry and ready for more. There will always be a part of you that reaches toward what might one day be.
But you cannot allow it to eclipse the part of you that sometimes doesn’t realize you’ve landed in the things you were once reaching for.
If we do not gradually train ourselves to notice, to pay attention, to carve out spaces where we nestle ourselves into our lives just as they are, and make them feel like home, we spend eternity on a trajectory that allows us to postpone not only our joy, but also, our inner work. Our reconciliation with ourselves. If we are only just waiting for the next big thing to fall into place to put our shoulders down, we are probably also waiting until that point to clean up the aspects of our lives that most need our attention.
The waiting periods of our lives are not only to be dealt with, but they are also to be embraced.
Within them, the most beautiful things of all often emerge.
This is the time life has given you to self-invest. This is the time life has given you to be alone, and when you get to be alone, you get to experience who you really are. You get to hear the sound of your own voice, the pull and push of your own intuition, your own opinion, your own truth. Unaltered from how you think you must be for others, in the very times when you think you have been abandoned, you have often been given the gift to be set free. This is the time life has given you to decide what version of you is going to meet that future you're waiting for when it eventually, and inevitably, arrives.
This is the time when you're going to define the depth of your bandwidth, of your ability to receive and hold and be. If you don't practice on the small things, when the big things arrive, they never fully reach you. They never completely land. This is because you were never really waiting on one more thing to come into the picture to feel at peace. You were waiting on your own readiness, your own capacity to notice a good thing when it's there, and before it's gone.
The point is that the waiting period is also the landing plane of a past waiting period you never thought you'd get through, you feared would never come. The point is that the waiting period is also the place where the most unexpected and beautiful aspects of your story can and will unfold. The point is that you don't know what you don't know.
Very few of us actually make it through all of our years and discover the timeline unfolded in perfect accordance with our initial expectations of it. None of us, in fact. But therein lies the magic. Because in the space where you weren't given what you wanted, you were handed what you needed. In the time you were given before the next thing came, you grew. You expanded. You changed. And if you use that time to become a version of yourself that is more authentic, the things you will find yourself reaching for will change as well.
You must have enough resolve to know you're not unconsciously going through the dance of life and getting judged and graded upon your performance.
You're engineering something that's never existed before, because no being exactly like you has ever been here before or will ever be again. Within this instant, and within you, there is something that can be uncovered, and you may never have the exact same opportunity to do so again.
Will you meet this moment with your full chest?
Wondermind does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Any information published on this website or by this brand is not intended as a replacement for medical advice. Always consult a qualified health or mental health professional with any questions or concerns about your mental health.
