Practical Magic | The Art of Active Waiting
Have you made less progress towards your goals than you'd like? Instead of beating yourself up, understand that you have probably been mastering the art of 'Active Waiting'.
There's a big difference between having something and being able to actually hold it. I offer an encouraging reframe for why slow and steady is the best kind of success.
The Best Way to Take Control of Something Is to Slow It Down
I'm recording this in December of 2021. The end of the year is a time where all kinds of feelings come up. We can't believe we're at the end of the year. We've lost track of what's actually happened and what's been done. It feels like there's a lot that's undone and we're running behind. We haven't moved forward enough with something or we're going too slowly.
What if the best way to take control of something is to slow it down?
I don't even need to remind you of this, but we live in a world where relentless speed at all times is normalized. 30 under 30 lists – unless you've had insane worldwide success by the age of 29, you've missed the boat. Crash diets – you should be pushing your body through insane amounts of change that affect complex, delicate systems in the shortest time possible for success. Speed dating, six figures in six months, money hacks, life hacks, the list goes on. How hard and how fast can you go?
We internalize millions of these messages throughout our whole lives, and so of course we adjust our internal speed barometer accordingly. We often feel frustrated, less than, and like a failure when we move more slowly than we think is right.
I want to offer a reality check. We are nature. We are part of nature just like all of the other organic organisms and systems on this planet. Take a look outside wherever you are, and look at the other living beings around you. Everything moves in cycles of energy was varied speeds. Nothing in our world is going all the time like a machine. We're all the same. Understanding that it is totally normal and natural for us to have varying speeds is the first step in breaking free from this ‘I'm not moving fast enough’ paradigm.
The way we can move through life that is sustainable and can bring us the most joy, satisfaction, and satiation is if we move as one and do things in an embodied way. Your mind, thoughts, emotional body, and physical body all have to move together.
Thoughts move very quickly. You can have an idea, come up with an insight, and create an entire universe in your head using your imagination in a split second. But because of the laws of our universe, actually making it happen in the material realm on a physical level takes a lot longer. There's something really funny about being a human being with a powerful brain and imagination, living in a physical body. It's an existential joke.
The Two Natural Ways We Experience Time
1. Gestational Momentum
The first way we experience time is the gestational time of being in a body. Being on body time; how long it takes for things to get done in a body. We have no control over certain processes in our bodies; they take as long as they're going to take. We can try and hack away without sleep, but at some point, it catches up with us. There is no hacking a body because its systems are set on a timeline that we have no control over. If we try and speed them up, we get slowed down, later on, to make up for that lost time.
2. Quantum Momentum
There's another way that we experience time, which is through our minds and imaginations. Quantum momentum can move so quickly, we can move a light-year in a millisecond.
The biggest existential joke of being human is living in this point of deep frustration between these two experiences. It’s so fun to come up with an entire life plan, new vision, dream, or financial goal in your mind. Then the slow, tedious process of one step forward, two steps back, and making it all work on the physical body level takes so long. It takes longer than what feels good.
This is what it means to be embodied: to move thoughts, emotions, and your body as one. Your body sets the pace. Moving in this togetherness is the most precious, valuable thing you can do for yourself. It's this togetherness that will make sure whatever it is you're going after – whether it's an enormous dream, achievement, goal, something you're building, or something you want to create for yourself – you will not just be able to have that thing, but eventually, you'll actually be able to hold it. There's a really big difference between having and holding.
The Difference Between Having and Holding
It's actually not that hard to achieve success, superficially and fleetingly. For instance, you may achieve success by losing tons of weight in a crash diet or by producing that big piece of work, but the pace is too fast for your body to hold. The achievement comes at a great cost and expense to other areas of your life. You're not likely to be able to hold it, sustain it, or keep it – to keep the weight off, to keep feeling good about the success, to be able to actually make it work in the long term – because you are moving faster than your body could feel. You are moving far ahead of your body, therefore because you’re getting it from a place of separation, you can't hold it.
What's the point of having things if we can't hold them, use them, benefit from them, experience them, share them, enjoy them, or savor them? Life just becomes a frantic tick-box exercise. We are racing from one goal to the next, never feeling satiated, never being able to enjoy what we have, never being able to hold on to anything that's good.
Being able to hold everything we want is what we're aiming for. Holding is only possible when we approach our desires and goals at a slower pace by honoring our body time, our gestational momentum. Trusting that in our so-called slow process, we are feeling our way through all the necessary little steps and adjustments, learning lessons, letting go of what needs to be let go, expanding, gently creating space, and calibrating to new setpoints as we go.
The Art of Active Waiting
Consider the concept of active waiting.
I talked about the two experiences of time we have as human beings: we have quantum momentum through our minds and imaginations, and we have gestational momentum in our bodies. A lot of the time, we feel like we're moving slowly and that nothing is happening. All we want is for that quantum leap to happen so that we’re suddenly moving at full speed.
Consider that there are only two speeds in life. You're either in the gestational momentum moving slowly and tediously, or you suddenly are in a phase of quantum momentum where you leap forward a whole decade in a month. But you don't get to control when those times happen for you.
Most of the time, we'll be in active waiting, the slower moving time. But understand that active waiting is where we receive the nourishment and power for the quantum speed time. Not passive waiting – waiting for everything to fall into our laps, giving up, or abandoning our efforts because it's not happening fast enough so what's the point? No, active waiting.
During pregnancy, a lot happens under the surface, things the pregnant person doesn’t have control over. Their mind is not involved in that process. There’s not a to-do list for how to make a baby. There's a lot of active waiting in a pregnancy. Active waiting includes things on the inside and also on the outside. Getting the external environment ready, and getting yourself ready mentally, physically, and emotionally for this new step in life. Raising energy, getting support, getting things lined up, and getting the resources you need.
We could do a better job of cultivating the practice of active waiting in the journey for us working towards other desires and goals that we have. Active waiting is essential if you want to ensure that when you're suddenly propelled into that quantum leap when suddenly everything is moving like lightspeed, your direction is correct and that you're actually facing the right way. That you're moving towards something that you actually want. When things feel slow during active waiting, your main job is to make sure you’re facing the right direction so that when suddenly everything speeds up, you can move smoothly and swiftly like an arrow.
Active waiting is when you tinker and hone your craft – perfecting, polishing, and refining all those steps and the skills you need on your journey towards your big desire.
Active waiting is when you cultivate energy-raising practices. Learning about what your body needs to succeed. What does my body need in order to be able to hold even just the first little bits of this desire that I'm working towards? How do I need to adjust my lifestyle and what's around me in order to become the person who can hold this on a physical level.
Active waiting is when you share your craft, gifts, and skills that you're perfecting and learning.
Active waiting is when you build the relationships and support structures that are going to help you hold the thing that you want. Because the person that you are now and the person who you need to become to be able to hold that thing you're working towards, are two very different people. That other person is going to be far more supported; they're going to have different relationships. Active waiting is about working towards those networks.
Active waiting is also about being open to life. It's about noticing what's around you, reflecting regularly, assessing where you are and what's needed. What do I need less of? What's going on for me? Where do I feel stuck? Where do I feel stagnant? What do I need to adjust? It’s a constant process of calibration, and you can only correctly calibrate and adjust when you're moving at a sustainable pace.
Finally, active waiting is about decluttering, releasing, letting go of what's no longer needed, letting go of what's not serving you, and setting new boundaries. These are things that you need – time, space, and a certain pace to be able to notice and feel. If you’re rushing through life, trying to force those brief moments of quantum momentum to happen on your schedule, you won't get these rich opportunities to prepare the way for what's coming.
Honor Your Process
Honor your process and understand that slow-moving is actually a precious gift that allows you to prepare the way for being able to hold the fullness of your desire and dream and keep it.
You don't get to control the speed at which you're moving. You're either going to be in gestational momentum or quantum momentum for a short period. When you're in quantum momentum and everything is moving so fast that you can barely process it, you’re going to be grateful and glad that you had all that time actively waiting to get ready to hold your big goal. To make sure that you are facing in the right direction and that you had everything you needed to succeed.
Active waiting and aligned action are what happens in that slow body-time space and that superfast quantum momentum space, but they need each other.
I hope that this has given you some encouragement, approval, or a bit of a release to understand that you're probably moving at exactly the right pace. You're probably right on time. If you feel like things are going really slow for you right now, it may be because you really need that slowness to prepare the way for what's to come.
Practice active waiting. Practice bringing your attention to some of those areas I mentioned. If you're feeling stuck and stagnant, it's not because you're not good enough, it's not right for you, or you're never going to do this. It's probably because there are places that your body is trying to point you to where you are currently unresourced or you don't have the energy you need. You're missing information. You don't have the structures you need. You don't have the people around you that need. Active waiting is exactly when you get to cultivate those things for yourself.
There are so so many big beautiful opportunities and triumphs coming your way. This slow, messy, sometimes tedious work that you're doing right now, or that resilience you're building, the receiving you're practicing, the boundaries you're creating and honoring, and those lessons that you are learning are what is building your capacity to hold and not just have all that you desire.
The fastest way to take control of something is to slow it down. So please defend your own slow progress.
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