The Waiting

A spiritual question dressed up as a professional one.

There is a version of courage that looks good on a vision board.

This is not that version.

This is the version where you stay home on a Saturday night because you would rather send one more thing out into the world than wonder later if you left something on the table. Not because you are certain it will work. Not because you feel inspired. Because the not-trying is worse than the trying, and you have decided to live by that math even when it exhausts you.

I have been in a season of sending things out. Putting my real story into the world, over and over, to people who may never see it. Writing letters that require me to show up fully, to say here is what I have done and here is why it matters and here is why I believe I am the right person for this. Then waiting. Then writing another one.

It is humbling in a way I did not anticipate.

Not because the work is beneath me. Because the silence is. You put something honest into the world and you get nothing back, and the silence does not mean no and it does not mean yes. It means wait. And waiting, when you have invested something real, takes a specific kind of discipline that nobody prepares you for.

A teacher once said to me: your words won't work if your presence doesn't work.

I have turned that over a hundred times in the last few months. Because the question underneath all of this is not whether the words are good. I know the words are good. The question is whether the presence behind them is real enough, grounded enough, honest enough to carry them across the distance between me and the person reading them. Whether something of me actually arrives.

That is a spiritual question dressed up as a professional one.

I have been developing what I can only describe as a muscle of not caring what happens next. Not indifference. Something different. The ability to send something out with full investment and then release it completely. To do the work as if it matters, because it does, and then let it go as if it is out of your hands, because it is.

Some days that muscle is strong. Some days I wake up and I am already bracing.

The honest thing is that I want certain things very much. There are places I have written to where the mission connected to something I have carried for a long time. Something personal. Something that required me to tell the truth about who I am and where I came from. Those are the hardest ones to wait on. Because you did not just send your credentials. You sent yourself.

What I keep coming back to is this: the only thing I can control is the quality of my effort and the honesty of what I put forward. I cannot control who reads it, when they read it, or whether what they need matches what I bring. I can only keep showing up and keep telling the truth.

So I stay home. I write one more. I send it.

Then I make jeera tea, close the laptop, and sit with the not-knowing for a while.

That is the practice. Some days it feels like enough. Some days enough is harder to locate than others. But I have learned that the days I keep going anyway are the ones that matter most, not because of what comes back, but because of who I am becoming in the reaching.

Your words won't work if your presence doesn't work.

So I work on the presence. The words take care of themselves.