Waiting and Listening While Things Grow

Last year, after unexpectedly and abruptly ending a major project, a friend wrote to me to say she was sorry things were ending but she wanted to encourage me. Something new would be birthed through this. Something, she said, would shake loose. I wanted to believe that was true. When a door closes, a window opens, or something like that. The things we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better.

But I could feel it. Something inside me was stirring. An idea, an inkling. What it was, I didn’t know, just that I could feel it growing and making its presence known.

Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic that ideas are all around us, ours for the taking if we act quickly lest they float off to someone more ready than we are. That might be true, but I think some ideas are ours and ours alone. They’ll wait for us, wait until we’re ready. When we can slow down and listen, they’ll make themselves known.

Was I listening?

The project ended because I was pushing it too hard. We quietly shut the doors and I slunk into the background. My friend tried to cheer me with encouragement that something good would come from this. I wanted to believe her, but whatever was meant to be birthed in me needed to grow faster. My patience had thinned out into one slender tendril.

What I didn’t know then, but should have, is that we’re always listening to one of two things: our true self or something else. It could be our ego, other people’s advice, the culture. We become afraid to do the wrong thing, we’re scared to miss out, and that fear leads us away from ourselves.

The antidote? Listening. Silence. Solitude.

In the quiet, we can hear our true self. When we clear away all the noise, all the other voices, we might finally, finally hear our own.

—

The other day, I sat on the patio with my husband Adam lamenting about my book project. With summer looming, it feels like I’m at a crossroads: Do I lean into the book this summer or away from it? This question has been on my mind for weeks and the uncertainty has been crazy making. I’ve been catering to a sense of urgency, an undercurrent of fear that’s telling me to finish this up now or else. Or else what exactly, I’m not sure.

That’s what fear does. It makes all things urgent, like a weed shooting up from the ground as soon as it’s been mowed over. Weeds grow fast, roots grow slowly. Weeds are persistent.

So is fear.

Earlier this year, I realized this issue of not slowing down and listening to myself was like a cancer in my heart. I’d get glimmers of that inner voice and want more of it, then turn around and go back out into the world hoping someone would validate what it said.

Here’s the thing: the inner voice doesn’t need validation. That’s why it comes as a whisper, not a shout.

It’s a listening life I want to cultivate. Cultivate, like a garden, tending to the slow-growing roots and digging out the weeds. After listening to all the voices, all the advice, all the ways you’re supposed to do things, it’s taking a while to untangle the mess of it. Weeds upon weeds.

Adam suggested I take a break from the book, but that didn’t feel quite right. He thought maybe I should tighten the timeline, give the story a container so it’s not splashing around all over the place. That felt better.

And yet, a question persists in the background: am I listening to what wants to be born here? Am I giving it space to grow and take shape?

We can go inside ourselves to urge whatever’s growing in there to move quicker, but things grow in their own time. We can’t rush something that’s waiting to be born any more than we can force a flower to grow. Maybe under certain circumstances you can hurry things along, but mostly we wait.

We wait with expectation.

We wait with hope.

We wait in silence, knowing that when this thing finally pushes through, it will come with the loud sounds of life, a living thing in the world.