What are some core creative capacities that are developed as we learn to wait?
Whether it’s waiting in a doctor’s office to hear the results of a medical test or waiting to hear back in response for college admissions, the ability to wait is a core capacity for creatives from all disciplines. Sometimes waiting can be fun, interestingly, perhaps when the outcome may not so critical to our lives. At other times, waiting may be likened to the force of tension that pulls at either end of a rope. If the force of tension is applied equally to all points of the rope, at which point would the rope begin to unravel before it completely snaps?
While we tend to focus our energies at the point of our greatest weakness, it is through these seasons of potential unravelling as creative tension that tests and builds our creative capacities. When we find ourselves in such rope unravelling moments, we are presented with an opportunity to gain perspective, an opportunity to be strong and to take courage.
Rather than giving in to weakness we learn to prefer confidence, to lean in, more firmly devoting ourself to look beyond the moment, to refrain from falling in to temptation, to be severe with ourselves, to reinforce our creativity by looking into gaps or weak spots and to say, as an ironsmith would of a soldering job well-performed might say, “it is good,” or as a carpenter might firmly secure a plank of wood with nails so that it cannot be moved.
Consider,
What are you waiting for? Or, more pertinently, how are you waiting? What would it look like to take courage and leverage the force of creative tension to make things happen in a way that results in a job well done?
Taking courage could include,
1. Strengthening oneself in the face of opposition or discouragement,
2. Being decisive or purposeful in taking a particular course of action,
3. Gaining a renewed awareness and alertness that informs timely decision-making,
4. Causing something to happen that could change the trajectory of lives everywhere, including your own.
The point is waiting with hope is not a passive posture. It is an active disposition to change the trajectory of the status quo. Significantly, what you wait for will affect how you wait.
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Ref. cited: Brown, Francis, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles Augustus Briggs. Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
