A Fresh Perspective on Waiting Seasons

I find the conversation about waiting seasons often makes it sound like they're empty rooms. These blank stretches of time between the life we had and the life we're trying to get to. Something to patiently wait out in hopes that what we want is on its way at some undefined moment in time, all while wrestling with bouts of control or anxiety, wondering if we are doing something wrong and just need to try harder.

But look back at any season you called "waiting," and you'll find it wasn't empty at all.

It was full. Full of the people who showed up right when you needed them. Full of the lesson you couldn't have learned any other way. Full of the version of you that was quietly being built while you were busy looking for the exit. The waiting was never real. What was real is that your attention was fixed somewhere else...on the thing you wanted instead of the thing you already had.

Here is the premise we get wrong.

We treat the current season as an obstacle between us and the "real" thing. So we wish it away. We rush it. We white-knuckle through it, eyes locked on the finish line, treating the present moment like a waiting room instead of the room we're actually meant to be in.

But what if the season itself is the gift? Not the thing standing between you and what's next, but the thing itself.

Calling it a "waiting season" is a quiet way of rejecting what currently is. It's a refusal to be where you actually are. And that refusal is subtle and often doesn't feel like resistance. It can actually feel responsible. Hopeful, even. I'm just waiting for the right time. I'm just waiting for things to align. But underneath it is a rejection: this isn't it yet. I don't have what I need. I don't have what I want.

What if nothing is being withheld?

The idea of "waiting" assumes something is being withheld from you — that you're in a holding pattern until the good part starts. But when you actually sit with a season instead of trying to escape it, you usually find the opposite is true. You weren't being withheld from. You were being given something you couldn't see yet, because you were looking past it.

This is the reframe: there is no waiting season. There is only the season you're in — and whether or not you're present for it.

The moment you stop asking "when will this be over" and start asking "what is this actually offering me," the waiting dissolves. Not because your circumstances changed, but because your relationship to them did. It stops feeling like a delay and starts feeling like exactly what it is: your life, right now, unfolding on time.

A different question to ask...

So instead of when will this season end, try asking: what is this season made of?

What's actually here, right now, that I keep looking past?

You might find — like I have, looking back on every stretch of my life I once called waiting...that it was never empty. It was full the entire time. You were just too focused on what wasn't to see what was.