On Waiting
When you wait in the calm strength of patience. When you wait for emotional clarity — you are very busy. Waiting is an active mode. You show up, you attend, you are attentive, you are listening to what’s going on inside. You fine-tune your instruments. You listen some more. It can be exhausting work. Exhaustion can be good for you. Ask the I ching (hexagram 47). It will tell you. You might wait there, bewildered and lost, under a dead tree, in a dead desert — for a long period of time. You might be “lost in these wanderings for three years.”. Waiting is hard work
But, for the outside world, this work, this exhausting, thankless labor, usually seem like nothing at all. “They” cannot understand it, “they” cannot reward it and, “they” cannot stand the wait. They become impatient. They become frustrated, disparaging. They tell you to get up and “do something.” Doing Anything seems better to the world outside than this nothingness of waiting.
You don’t care. You cannot. YOU CANNOT lose your FOCUS. Though ‘“they” may not perceive it, you are doing such important work. Though they can’t see or understand it, you’re practicing active passivity. It’s the energy of The Receptive — The 2nd hexagram of the I-Ching and Human design 2nd gate.
The receptive is a crucial, and frequently overlooked energy. It forms an essential counterpart for The Creative, which is represented by the 1st hexagrams/gate. In human design these two gates are located at the very top and the very bottom of your G center, your higher heart, pointing to your throat and your sacral, respectively. Together they represent the entire creative process, Yin and Yang, Thanatos and Eros, life and death, creative activity and receptive devotion.
Learning how to wait therefore involves a deep, radical rewiring of your whole frame of mind. A willingness to accept both the passive and the active. A willingness, also, to withstand the pressure of your own internalized criticism of “inaction”.
For we favor “blasting through” and disparage surrender.
Only when you can begin to relinquish the idea that forcing action is the only approach to life, will you begin to truly wait.
For those who need to wait — which in human design is everybody — the Maxime according to which action is always better than inaction needs to be the first thing out the window. As you begin your deconditioning process . I dare you to remain passive! I dare you to relinquish action in favor of surrender. It is when you are willing to not do — despite the mind’s chatter — that you will begin to see what this waiting business is all about. Love and peace to all.
