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Waiting Well

Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening.
– Henri Nouwen, “A Spirituality of Waiting”


I’m sure there are cancers that are medical emergencies, but breast cancer is not one of them. Breast cancer is one of those conditions that manages to feel like an emergency, whilst not actually being one. Something irregular might be there? Let’s get a follow-up scan in—one month. A biopsy, in two weeks, followed by pathology results, in ten days. Someone to call you to schedule that referral, eventually. So far, having cancer has mostly felt like playing a game where the stakes are high but the progress excruciatingly slow and incremental, where answers only lead to more questions.

Update: we have a surgical plan (unilateral complete mastectomy without reconstruction, with sentinel lymph node biopsy)—though I’m still waiting to do the paperwork, and then to get called with a surgery date. The tumor board has decreed that I do not require radiation, chemotherapy, or targeted antibody therapy unless lymph nodes return positive after surgery—however, given how unclear my case is, I am being referred for a second opinion at another institution, which I am waiting to schedule. There is a second (lobular) kind of cancer that will require hormone therapy—but that will start after the first (ductal) kind has been treated, which could be in two months or in one year. I’m waiting to find out. I’m waiting to find all of it out.

In a world that idolizes quantifiable productivity and expects instant gratification, waiting is something we instinctively avoid. We see waiting as some liminal wasteland we are trapped in by events outside our control, an empty space which exists only to be escaped from as quickly and expediently as possible. We spend all our energy while waiting trying to get out of it, trying to recover the control and knowledge that we believe will allow us to move forward with our lives.

But what if waiting itself is the point, the space which reveals and refines the most important things about us, if we let it? What does it mean to let the waiting do its work? What does it mean to wait well?

Our older daughter is one of the few fifteen-year-olds around without a phone, which gives her an interesting take on life. Once she came back from a school trip to Disneyland exclaiming, “Mom, you wouldn’t believe it, but the entire time we’re waiting in line, all my friends were on their phones!” They could have been chatting or looking around this fantastical world together, but instead she just stood there while they all stared at their screens.

The first step to waiting well is to stop staring somewhere else. To stop looking beyond, to stop distracting ourselves, long enough to be present to the current moment, in the conviction that something is happening. Because something does happen when we wait: anxieties flare and longings are laid bare. We’re forced to see with unavoidable clarity where our hopes and fears lie. We’re forced to confront our addiction to control, our desire for the future to go at a certain pace and direction.

As we see these things, we begin to understand that it is here, in the unresolved spaces, when nothing external is happening, that we are most able to see and deal with these deeper things. We’re able to practice surrender as we learn to wait open-endedly, to practice patience as we dare to stay where we are and notice what arises. We’re able to connect with others in a way that is deep and real. And we’re able to distinguish between wishing and hoping, between wishing on circumstances, and hoping in promises. As Nouwen puts it, “Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, but fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes. Therefore, hope is always open-ended.” Wishing fills us with anxiety and urgency. Hope fills us with surety even in surrender.

I am here to tell you that there is nothing passive about waiting. Waiting well is the most active thing we can do. Allowing ourselves to be present to the wait, to practice patience and surrender, to feel out where our hopes lie, resisting the urge to catastrophize and rush ahead—all of that takes an incredible degree of energy and intentionality. It takes learned skills, like routines of prayer or exercise, mental checks, connection in community. It takes knowing when you need something beautiful, or something sad; when you need a pep talk, or no words at all. It takes the courage to look inside and be honest about what you see.

Waiting, it turns out, is no wasteland at all. It is full of movement. Not the kind of movement we might want, or others might see, but the kind that really matters. The kind that shapes the most important things about who we are, and what we hope in. It is a rich and variable terrain, at times turbulent, at times still, but always instructive, always a place in which we are invited to practice what we really believe. We believe, after all, in a promise, the promise that something has begun in us that will not yet fail—something in which each season in life, even and especially the seasons of suffering through waiting, play a part. And so we wait on, and I wait on, through all these long days.