A bigger aquarium... or the ocean? – By Marie-Pier Charron, Life and Career Coach

That awful thing called waiting
By Marie-Pier Charron

Do you have a hard time dealing with delays? Today, I’m inviting you to see them in a whole new way…

You have thought about it, you have imagined it in great details, you have chosen it and you are determined to do everything you can to get it. Your vision is so clear you can almost smell it, hear it, touch it. You are ready, you want it more than anything… But WHY hasn’t it manifested itself yet?

The “it” I’m referring to can be anything. Maybe, for you, it’s a baby, a job, a lover, a big break… In any case, the thing is: this planet is not one of those where we instantly get what we desire (I know such planets exist. I have seen glimpses of it at Disney Land). Even the seeds we plant in our garden take some time to give us the smallest germ…

Facing a large strech of what appears to be plain brown soil is frustrating, boring at best. Especially when we’ve put all our heart into sowing the seeds we have meticulously chosen. So, under what logic should we accept this waiting period, this lapse of time between the “I want” and the “I have”? How can we be patient when we are intense, avid, passionate? Some people simply tell themselves “I can’t make it go faster, so I may as well be at peace with how things are now”. How do I envy them! Stubborn as I am, this “Can’t change it so let’s accept it” thing has never worked for me. The only way I found to make peace with the waiting period was to become aware of its importance…

An invisible pregnancy
One day, there’s only you and your cat Kitty; the day after, there’s you, Kitty, plus a luminescent creature on two feet who doesn’t like cat food and makes your heart skip a beat. One day, there’s you and a bunch of résumés; the day after, there’s you, and a voice message informing you that you got one of the jobs for which you applied…

We think that things happen like BAM!, that what we want appears all at once, after weeks, months, sometimes years of status quo… As I see it, nothing could be further from the truth. Even when nothing is going on, something IS going on. Go ask a pregnant woman! The day the child is born is just the culmination of a long process. And it’s a similar process that precedes the “birth” of our juicy goals and dreams. They have a period of gestation, too… The difference is that in those cases, the pregnancy is not visible. Far from sight, life is working on our behalf to materialize our desires, just like it works on behalf of the seed we have planted in your garden, or the fetus in our uterus. It’s the natural order of things. It really is.

My point today is that waiting, in a certain way, is an illusion. What’s behind it is growth, development, consolidation… During what appears to be an undesirable delay, we become what we need to become in order to live what we want to live. Without even realizing it, we clarify what we want, we connect with our truth, we align ourselves with our goals and we get ready to welcome them into our life. We “brood” our new reality until it materializes.

So even though waiting can be frustrating, irritating to the point of biting our toe nails (yes, I have done it!), sometimes it’s the best thing that could happen to us to get to the next wonderful stage of our life. There are certain things we cannot and should not control; certain moments when the very best thing to do is to patiently stroke our beautiful big pregnant belly…