The Work of Waiting
Back to school season always reminds me of waiting that felt endless when I was a kid. Waiting to officially be a grade older. Waiting to find out what teachers I had. Waiting to see what friends (or boys) I had classes with. Waiting for the big day when school finally started again. (I suspect I am not alone among the coach community in being one of those kids who looked forward to going back to school!)
Now, as an adult and busy working mom of three, I have a new appreciation for waiting. Having to wait creates a space, a slower beat, a pause. In our overstimulated, always-connected lives, these moments can feel like precious luxuries. Embracing them—cultivating them, even—is essential to an intellectual pursuit like writing.
One form of writing I pursue is freelancing for a local magazine. Each time I take on an article, I first have to negotiate with my husband when I can take time away to do interviews, and I have to slot those interviews in around my other responsibilities. In other words, I have to cultivate the luxury of a pause. I have to clear my schedule and head so I can focus on the art of storytelling.
During interviews I often find myself doing still more waiting—there is nothing like an awkward silence to get someone talking. (Perhaps some of you have used this technique when coaching—I find it just as effective in that setting.) And once my interviews are done, I often stare for days at a blank page, cursor blinking, not writing, just…waiting.
It can feel discouraging, this waiting. I’m not cut out for this, I’ll say to myself. I’m going to miss my deadline. But eventually, I’ll be in a shower or out for a run and suddenly the lead will come to me and the rest of the structure will fall into place. Recently, I composed a whole lead in my head while hiking on Mount Sentinel. When I got back to my desk I just had to type it down.
The waiting feels passive, but it isn’t. My brain is actively, though subconsciously, working on the ideas, the phrasing, and the structure of the whole piece. It just requires time.
For the first time in human history, we, and the students we coach, have at our fingertips the ability to end this waiting. Generative artificial intelligence platforms like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT can take an unpolished idea and, in a matter of seconds, spit out a decent 500-word blog post or five-paragraph essay about Of Mice and Men.
But taking this shortcut does exactly that—it cuts short the intellectual journey of reasoning through ideas and getting to the point where those ideas are ready to come out as full sentences, in a coherent order. A slower beat is necessary for thoughts to stretch, connect, and gather meaning. The reason I have to wait before I can write is because I haven’t figured out yet what I want to say and how I want to say it. The idea of having a piece of software created by insular Silicon Valley types take an average of the existing internet and tell me what I should think is tempting only for the time I’d save. When I pause to remember what I’d be giving up – my ability to think for myself—temptation quickly fades.
If I were a middle or high school student today, though, I’m not sure I would pause long enough to come to that realization. I might take the shortcut, and the thought of how many young people don’t see the cost of the shortcut is one reason I am motivated to be a writing coach. Though the time we spend with them passes quickly, we have an opportunity with each student to reinforce the importance of thinking and writing independently. To teach, and model for them, that waiting is not empty—it is generative. It holds the beginnings of stronger ideas, clearer arguments, and a more authentic voice.