The Unexpected Gift of Waiting

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of frustration around waiting in my coaching room. “I’m just waiting until…” “I’m in this strange waiting period.” “It feels like my life is on hold.” And this summer, I have found myself saying some of those same things.

I have been in the process of moving and have spent much of the summer living in a temporary rental house. I knew the waiting would be inconvenient, but I have been surprised by how challenging it has felt. There is something unsettling about living in between places. It has been difficult to feel fully settled or grounded when my surroundings, routines, and even some of the ordinary rhythms that help me feel at home have felt temporary. It has given me a deeper appreciation for what so many of my clients experience when they find themselves in a season of waiting.

And waiting is common. We wait for test results, job offers, college acceptance letters, babies to be born, children to come home, relationships to heal, surgeries to be over, and, especially here in Minnesota, for spring to finally replace winter. We wait for grief to soften. We wait for clarity. We wait to feel like ourselves again. We wait for the next chapter to begin.

We often experience waiting as a kind of limbo—as though our “real” life is temporarily suspended and will resume once we have the answer, resolution, opportunity, or certainty we are longing for.

When we don’t know what is coming, it can be tempting to fill the uncertainty with doing: thinking, planning, researching, checking, organizing, anticipating, and trying to figure out every possible outcome.

But what if waiting isn’t the absence of living? What if waiting is an important part of living?

This question comes up often in my work with grief and life transitions. When something significant changes—a death, diagnosis, retirement, empty nest, career change, relationship ending, move, or even a quieter transition that leaves us wondering, What now?—there is often a period when we simply don't know what comes next. We may want to rush through the uncertainty and get back to feeling settled, certain, or like ourselves again. But grief and transformation don't work on a predictable schedule.

Our culture tends to value movement. We admire productivity, achievement, efficiency, and forward momentum. Waiting, by comparison, can feel passive or unproductive. Yet some of the most important changes in our lives happen during periods when, from the outside, very little appears to be happening.

There is an interesting parallel in the brain. When we aren't focused on a specific external task, a collection of interconnected brain regions known as the default mode network becomes more active. This network is associated with autobiographical memory, imagining possible futures, reflecting on experiences, and making meaning. In other words, the brain isn't necessarily “doing nothing” when we step away from a task. Some important forms of processing happen when we create space to reflect.

Most of us have experienced this. We wrestle with a decision for days, only to find a little more clarity while walking, driving, showering, or even waiting for a friend to show up for lunch. Sometimes the pause gives our minds space to process what we couldn't force through effort alone.

Stillness is not necessarily inactivity.

This is particularly important during times of transition. Our brains naturally seek patterns, predictability, and a sense of control. When those things are missing, we may try to restore them by thinking about the situation even more. We replay conversations, search for answers, imagine possible scenarios, check our phones, make lists, and try to solve something that may not yet be solvable.

It can feel productive. But sometimes it simply keeps us activated.

This is one reason I find waiting so interesting in coaching. We may not be able to change what someone is waiting for, but we can explore how they are experiencing the waiting. Can I be present when I don't know the answer? Can I distinguish what I can control from what I cannot? Can I care for myself while uncertainty unfolds? Can I allow something to emerge without constantly trying to force it?

These are not passive questions. They require awareness, emotional regulation, self-compassion, and a willingness to stay connected to the present rather than constantly living in the future.

I have been practicing these questions myself this summer.

Living in a temporary space has made me realize how much our physical environments can influence our sense of groundedness. There is something about knowing where things belong, having familiar routines, and feeling settled in a space that quietly tells the nervous system, You are home. You can exhale here. Without that, I have sometimes felt as though I am living with one foot in the present and one foot in the future.

But perhaps that is part of what this season is teaching me. I don't have to wait until I am in my new house to feel completely at home in my life. I can create small moments of steadiness where I am. I can establish routines, enjoy the people and experiences that are here now, and notice what is good about this chapter rather than viewing it only as something to get through.

We don't always get to choose the waiting. But we can sometimes choose how we inhabit it.

I have seen this in my coaching work. Someone waiting for medical answers discovers a resilience they didn't know they possessed. Someone approaching retirement begins to wonder, perhaps for the first time, Who am I beyond what I do? Someone navigating a relationship transition begins reconnecting with values and parts of themselves that had been quiet for a long time. And someone grieving slowly discovers that even while life feels uncertain and unfamiliar, moments of connection, meaning, and even joy can still find their way in.

None of these people would have chosen the waiting. Yet the waiting became part of their process of becoming.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of waiting: it asks us to stop measuring our lives only by visible progress. We can still live while we wait. We can care for our bodies, spend time with people we love, notice beauty, take a walk, laugh when laughter comes, cry when tears come, do something meaningful, rest, and pay attention to what is changing within us.

Thomas Friedman's Thank You for Being Late offers an interesting perspective on this. In a world that seems to be accelerating faster and faster, unexpected pauses can create opportunities to reflect, adapt, and catch our breath. We spend so much energy trying to eliminate delays that we rarely stop to ask what a pause might be offering us.

Perhaps it is offering us something we couldn't receive while rushing: time to listen, let go, reconsider what matters, or become acquainted with a version of ourselves we haven't met before. Perhaps it gives us space to notice that not all growth is visible while it is happening.

This is something I return to often in my coaching and something I am trying to practice in my own life right now. We don't always need to figure everything out today. Sometimes the work is simply to stay present to this chapter of our lives and ask:

What is here for me right now?

Not, How do I make this uncertainty go away?

Not, How quickly can I get back to normal?

But: What is this season asking of me? What might I need to learn, release, or make space for? What is changing beneath the surface? How can I care for myself while I wait?

Because sometimes waiting is not a detour from the journey. Waiting is the journey.

And perhaps when we finally look back, we may discover that what felt like an interruption was actually an important part of the story—an invitation to slow down, listen, reorient, and notice who we are becoming.

Maybe the next chapter isn't waiting for us somewhere in the future.

Maybe, quietly and almost imperceptibly, it is already beginning.