Building a Life Inside the Waiting

Have you put your life into a kind of pause while you wait for the hard thing to resolve? I will live again when this is over. I will see friends again. I will read again. I will plant the garden again. I will be myself again. Just not yet. The pause feels practical. It feels like you are conserving energy for the harder thing. But the pause has a cost, and over months and years that cost is high. You can lose track of who you are in the pause. You can forget what you loved. You can become a person who is waiting, rather than a person who is living.

Your life is happening now. Not when the difficult thing resolves. Not on the other side of the unknown. Now. Today, in this room, with this body, with these particular hours. Some of those hours are taken up by the difficult thing, yes. Many of them are not. Many of them are available, if you choose to claim them.

You can do small ordinary things — a friend over for soup, a small room painted a color you have been wanting, the slow walk, the long book read a little at a time — even while the larger uncertainty continues. None of these require the larger uncertainty to be resolved. They only require you to notice that today is also a day, and to give some of it to your own life.

You may worry that letting yourself live during a hard season is somehow disloyal to the seriousness of what you are inside. It is not. The seriousness of the season does not require you to suffer through every available hour. Your wellbeing is exactly what you are protecting by continuing to live inside it. The people you love want you to be a person, not a vigil. The future version of you will be grateful you did not put yourself away for a season.

Today, do one thing that belongs to your actual life and not to the difficult chapter. Just one. Read a page. Call a friend. Sit in the sun. Notice the ordinary pleasure of being alive in a body in a particular afternoon. You are allowed.