What role does “waiting” serve in your life?

Life is all about timing… the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable become available, the unattainable… attainable. Have the patience, wait it out.

— Stacey Charter

Lately I’ve been trying to come to terms with a pattern I often find myself muddled in…  It goes like this:

• Self-assign a project…
• Set off with resolve…
• Power work it.
• Stall…
• Power Work it.
• Stall…

The Stall Stages quickly make me crazy and thrust me into a downward spiral of uncertainty, impatience and acute annoyance. I find waiting with a half-baked project at the “mess-stage-of-finished” frustrating and confusing. Then I start doubting: my stamina, my resolve, my ability to push through to completion…

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.

— Robert H. Schuller

Ok, I get it.  Best not make decisions while I’ve lapsed into such crazy-making self-doubt.  Better I should “give it a rest” and do something else.  As it happens, I keep a list for such occasions; it’s my “Apcray List” – that’s Pig Latin and I’ll let you do the translation.  My list is filled with junk stuff that needs to get done and should be easy to do… And, barring any complications, when I’m working on one of the Apcray List items, I feel like I’m being productive while I get some relief from the stress of my unhappiness and frustration at being stymied at a Stall Stage.

Aside from the fact that I do well to heed Schuller’s advice, what’s it all about, this intermittent waiting??

Waiting, Dawning, Done

What if the power is in the waiting itself… in the space waiting creates?

— Terry Hershey

Here’s what I think: The waiting is about letting my mind wander into solutions that I don’t know I know.  Eventually, if I give myself a break, a “dawning” peeks over the horizon of my consciousness and I find myself suddenly back at work, moving forward with a new solution that clears the mess and catapults me to “done”, often with marvelous and creative surprises in the execution.  Innovators and psychologists consider this the incubation stage in the creativity process:

Incubation: The experience of leaving a problem for a period of time, then finding the difficulty evaporates on returning to the problem, or even more striking, that the solution “comes out of the blue”…

— TechnicalProblemSolving.blogspot.com

Yes indeed.  Waiting is often about setting aside worry and frustration and, instead, doing something different! When I’m feeling stymied, when I’m at a loss for what to do next, when I’m stalled… that’s when I MUST remember to shift gears… and recall that I often get my best results when I embrace instead of fight the Stall Stage of my own productivity process.

Today I finally moved forward on a stalled project.  I’d worried relentlessly over the need to finish and then, in disgust, gave up and went for a walk.  And upon my return, a mere 40 minutes later, I launched into a delightful solution using materials I’d had at hand but never before thought to use!

One mess down, too many more to go… Sigh.

Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate. Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Are you making room in your life for the creativity that waiting invites?