A Literary Prescription for
For the in-between, when nothing is resolved yet and there is no way to rush it.
Waiting is one of the least respected forms of effort there is, mostly because it produces nothing visible while it’s happening. A test result, a job offer, a phone call that hasn’t come — the waiting itself is real work, even when it looks from the outside like nothing is going on at all. The books, poems, and words gathered here are for that strange, suspended stretch, and for getting through it without losing yourself.
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”John Milton, On His Blindness
Books
Books for the stretch with no shortcut through it.
Slowing Down to the Speed of Life
Two psychotherapists make the case that most of our suffering comes from rushing toward a future that hasn’t arrived rather than living inside the present, however unfinished it feels. Their exercises are aimed at lowering the urgency that makes waiting feel unbearable.
This National Book Award–winning novel follows a man who waits eighteen years to divorce his wife and marry the woman he loves, only to find the waiting itself has changed him more than the outcome ever could. It is a sobering, beautifully restrained meditation on what indefinite waiting actually costs.
Hoff uses Winnie-the-Pooh to explain the Taoist principle of wu wei, or effortless action, the art of not forcing outcomes before their time. Pooh, it turns out, has been quietly practising patient non-doing all along.
Two men wait by a tree for someone who never arrives, filling the time with talk, games, and small absurdities, in what remains the definitive literary portrait of suspended time. It is bleaker and funnier than its reputation suggests, and oddly comforting for anyone whose own wait has started to feel circular.
Poetry
Poems written from inside an unresolved moment.
“Adlestrop”
Edward Thomas, 1917
Nothing happens in this poem — a train stops unexpectedly, no one gets on or off, and then it leaves again — and yet Thomas makes that empty, waiting minute feel like the most alive moment in the whole poem. Waiting, he suggests, can be its own kind of arrival.
“On His Blindness” (Sonnet 19)
John Milton, c.1655
Milton wrote this after losing his sight, grappling with the fear that he could no longer contribute anything of value. His resolution — that simply standing and waiting can itself be a form of service — remains one of the most quoted lines in the language for good reason.
“Patience Taught by Nature”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1844
Browning sets human impatience against a natural world that endures unhurried, season after season, and asks for nothing grander than the quiet endurance of a blade of grass. It is a small, humbling kind of prayer for anyone whose waiting has started to feel like falling behind.
Quotes & Prose
For the part of the process that looks like nothing.
Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.
Joyce Meyer
It seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
You do not have to know how long this will last to know that you are still becoming someone while it does.
Georgia Clare